 Hello and welcome to today's webinar. What is marketing and why do we need it? Today we will be discussing how the worlds of sales and marketing are changing and how you can learn to adapt in order to compete. So let's get started. I would now like to welcome our presenter for today, Peter Strohkob from Peter Strohkob Consulting. Peter is a hands-on sales and marketing professional with over 20 years sales and marketing management experience. He is the CEO of Peter Strohkob Consulting International, a business consulting firm specializing in lifting sales results in large organizations by working with their seed-level executives and sales and marketing leaders to help their teams work more effectively together. So we definitely have the expert here today and without any further ado I'd like to hand it over to lovely Peter. How are you? Good morning Sarah. Good morning everybody. Great to have you here and great to see people from Queensland and from Victoria coming in and hopefully throughout the session we'll get some more people from Sydney to join me as well. The thing I've been told I need to do in my webinars first thing is to have an agenda. I always thought people didn't want agendas because they're boring but I've been told I have to have one. So I'm going to talk a little bit about me, change this over time, what the problem looks like, what a solution could be, what's in it for you, next steps and then we'll have a special prize and then I'll say thank you and we'll have a bit of Q&A. So that was painlessness and I'll just move on to that. So a little bit about me. Now I've spent more than 15 years in either sales or marketing roles in some of the largest organizations on the planet so you can see Sony, CSC3M and Canon predominantly in the B2B space for me. And the thing that I've seen continuously is that sales and marketing teams don't really work as well together as they could and there's a wonderful phrase that a CEO of an Australian IT company gave me and he's allowed me to use it and that is there's a gap between sales and marketing, the larger the organization, the larger the gap. And that seems to be really true and that's kind of fired the passion of me to do something about it and I've developed something called the one team method. Now on the bottom right there you can see there's a book. I'm very happy to say that there'll be a book launch next Wednesday in Sydney and there'll be free drinks and food so if you happen to be in Sydney come and join me for the book launch. It'll be at the Park Royal in Sydney near Darling Harbour then. Now I also guest lecture at the Sydney Business School in the Executive MBA program there and in the MBA Masterclass at the University of Fulingong and a guest lecture in Sales and Marketing Collaboration and Alignment and I'm now finally allowed to say that for the first time, and I think this is an Australian first, for the first time we will have sales incorporated into the Executive MBA program in the Business School in Australia and this is starting with the intake this year. So exciting times because normally believe it or not sales has not featured in the MBA or the EMBA program at all. It was finance and marketing and strategy and all that sort of thing but the function that brings in the dollars was kind of overlooked somehow and we rectified that and it's a really good thing. I also have a LinkedIn group. It's called the Sales Plus Marketing Collaboration Community. You look it up on LinkedIn and feel free to join in. It's a really cool community. It's growing very quickly and we now have over 2,500 members I think at last count. I'm a speaker. I am C-conferences. So for example I'm speaking at the Custom Experience Management Forum in Sydney on Wednesday of next week and that's a three-day conference that I'm seeing as well I'm speaking at and I'm also an Executive Mentor on Coach. So if you need some mentoring or coaching come and talk to me afterwards. All right, so that's enough about me. Let's look at what the changes have been over the last 10 years in sales and marketing. Now anyone that's been buying stuff over the last 10 years will know or actually been selling stuff over the last 10 years will know that things have changed quite a bit and that increasing the boundaries between sales and marketing are blurring and that we're trying to fix the blurring and the new changes and the distinctions that we're making with technology. Now if you look at the three COGs that I've drawn up here we have a very strong preference for starting off with the people, getting the people to agree that they want to work together then getting them to agree how they want to work together now that they're actually talking to each other and then we support all that with technology. I just recently published a blog I think it was two or three weeks ago where I said is business technology and CRM in particular, customer relationship management software in particular, is that implemented the wrong way around? Do we start off with the technology and then hope that the people will use it or should we just really get the people involved to get them to agree that the technology is a good thing and that they will actually benefit from using it and then roll out the technology after they've agreed to it. At the moment it seems to me that we get fascinated with technology, we implement it and there's an edict on the implementation team to install it on time and on budget but there's no mention of realising the business benefits that the software or the technology is meant to be delivering to the organisation in the first place and then when it hits the end users the people that actually have to operate the software they find that they're not as accepting of it as one would hope and usually with these things there is an expectation on uptake and utilisation of the new technology and very often these expectations are disappointed because the people weren't on board when the technology came along so I'm a very strong believer that technology is a good thing, it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing but just the way that we go about implementing it and bringing it to the people is in my opinion not fantastic I think we can do a lot better so if you're interested go and have a look at my LinkedIn profile and all my publications there, that's where I do my blogging. So the point is that we still need people and we want the people to use the technology and we want them to agree on processes with each other and so we need a holistic approach that encompasses people, process and technology but in that order of priority and sequence. So the people first, processes second and the technology third. By the way if you disagree with me just feel free to type in and we'll have a little discussion about that. Alright, I want to come to something slightly related. Here's a Google report on how many searches have occurred over the last five years actually last ten years nearly in the terms advertising and marketing so how many times over the last ten years has the term advertising or marketing featured in Google searches and the thing that's quite obvious here is that the trend is going down the interesting thing is what happens if we put the word digital in front of advertising and marketing and you can see traditional marketing and advertising is slowing down but digital is booming. If you look at the blue graph here for digital marketing you can see that's really taking off even more so than content marketing which is the new kid on the block in terms of sales and marketing relationships is concerned. So the interesting thing is that digital is taking off and the old analog way is slowly dying out or not becoming as important as it was before. That is also reflected in digital marketing budgets so you can see over the last four years we've had the budgets going up quite a bit and they've almost tripled since 2009 and we haven't got the, obviously we haven't got the 2015 figure yet but we'll expect when that comes out it'll be closer to the 50% mark that 50% of the budget will be digital and it'll be on par with the analog marketing budget. Okay, now here is a bit of a consequence of all this change that's going on. This is a report from the Four Nays Marketing Group in the UK and they had simply asked CEOs how happy are you with the marketing people or with the marketing team and unfortunately they said 70% of the CEOs said that they were not happy with the marketers which is a phenomenal figure. If you say 30% you go okay well there might be some bad eggs there but 70% of marketers were not living up to the expectations of their CEOs. Now how can we interpret that? So either the marketers weren't doing what they meant to be doing or maybe the expectations of the CEOs are a bit unrealistic and if you look at the second paragraph there the CEOs were expecting more leads that are sales ready to be delivered to sales people from the marketing team. They wanted the sales people to be enabled to grow more market share and to grow the revenue. Now if you think about it really hard you'll find that none of these are really marketing outcomes because marketing is meant to be helping with the brand recognition and the profile and the thought leadership and the positioning in the marketplace and basically help the sales force to make a sale but it's not meant to really make the sale for the sales force. So I have a bit of a concern over this survey because if the CEOs really think that the marketing is there to create more revenue then I think we have a bit of a disconnect there in the first place. Now don't get me wrong I'm not saying that marketing is not there to help sales. It absolutely is but the marketing people are not selling so they can hardly be held accountable for revenue but there is a lot of debate at the moment about lead generation, lead management, lead nurturing and handing over to the point where we've got all these 3D algorithms now of marketing generated leads so MGLs and sales accepted leads, SALs and marketing qualified leads and QLs and so on. So there's a whole lot of technology in terms of marketing automation and sales force automation systems going in where marketing is meant to create the leads, distribute them to sales and then sales follow them up and there is an expectation of what those leads should look like and what the quality of those should be and that's a whole different subject again. Now when we talk about the disconnect between sales and marketing and we'll come to marketing soon I promise it's not just us talking about the disconnect. If you look at these 2 papers here, even way back in 2007 Gardner put out a paper saying that marketing and sales working together is a good thing and they wrote the whole paper on that and you can still look it up it's available online. The thing that really surprised me was there's a paper by the Harvard Business Review out which 3 prominent marketers have written and including Neil Rackham and Neil Rackham is pictured here is the founder of spin selling. So he invented spin selling methodology and the reason I've got him pictured here is he's a bit of a personal hero of mine because he actually went about finding out about spin or developing spin in a quieter scientific way. So he did a lot of work with very large organizations Fuji Xerox was one of them and he studied the behavior of the salespeople to find out why are the good ones good and the bad ones bad and he found some common traits amongst the good ones and that helped him to develop the spin selling methodology. So he's a bit of a legend in the sales game and for these three prominent experts to call their book or their paper ending the war between sales and marketing so they're not calling it a disconnect or a conflict or a gap they're calling it a war. There's hardly a stronger word you can use for a relationship between two groups of people so that really surprised me and made me think that there is probably something to it that it is worth looking into and so that helped me with my inspiration to develop the one team method to help them work together again as one team so sales and marketing elaborating. Now we're not alone in this because if you look at a study based from 2013 now they said in the coming years, so 2014, what initiatives will your company be undertaking to improve sales performance and there's a whole bunch of options given there and the one that got the most was enhancing lead generation so we've talked about that that more leads is good. I'm not quite a strong believer in saying more leads is good I'm a strong believer in saying better leads high-quality leads is good but that's a different discussion again but number two was aligning sales and marketing so what does that tell us? It tells us that sales and marketing are not aligned and that they need aligning and there's some special ways to go about it so it's a popular thing it's hot, it's a hot subject and there's a recognition that aligning sales and marketing brings business benefits so this is where you come in I'm going to ask you to just type in whether you're sales or marketing or something else I'll just give you a minute to do that can you please just type in sales or marketing or else? I think it seems to be quite an even split there but we also have some people in events as well Peter we also have people in events So this is great, Dominica you're else and sales and marketing, you're everything that's fantastic and Angela is the sales and marketing director and actually I'll talk about research in a minute but the thing that we found was really effective was that if sales and marketing reported to one head who then reported to the CEO was much more effective than having a separate head of sales marketing who then independently from each other reported to the CEO they were much more successful so this is great so we've got both sales and marketing well represented which means that we're all ready for the next question which is how well do you think your sales and marketing teams are working together so the question is a bit loaded by saying seamlessly but I'll change it slightly by could you just say yes, no, okay not really well, just give it your own spin I'll just give you a minute so it looks like I see a lot of room for improvement I guess that's not really a surprise because if everything was hunky-dory you wouldn't be in this webinar so that's probably a reflection of you being here as well so now let's have a look at why that is and why you're not alone here's a collection of statistics from around the world on sales and marketing collaboration and I'll be stepping just through them so CSO Insights is a US-based think tank and they did some research and it says that less than a third of a sales rep's time is spent on actual selling now I run an executive round table group in Sydney where we get senior executives from various industries together and we talk about the sales and marketing collaboration and how it's working in their organisation and what could be done the point is that they all tell me 35% is a very high number that they're selling in Sydney or certainly in Sydney if not in Australia it's less than 20% of the sales rep's time is actually spent selling and for this purpose of the exercise we define selling as actual communication with a prospect so whether that's online, on phone, on Skype or face-to-face doesn't matter but actual direct communication with a prospect we say it's less than 20% of their time is spent doing that and that's what we're talking about with sales reps can I just ask you if anybody disagrees with that figure in their organisation? So what would it mean if we could improve on that? What if we freed up their time from 30% and gave them an extra 15% and made it 50% so an extra 15% of selling time if we take a nice round figure and make it $100 million organisation then that extra 15% would translate into, you guessed it $15 million in revenue and let's say they have a 30% profit margin that would translate to another $4.5 million into the bottom line simply by freeing up the sales reps to be given more time of spending in front of a client now Julia is asking does this statistic include driving time? It does not the statistic is meant to convey actual time spent with the prospect like I said either face to face or online or on Skype or sending them an email direct client interaction, not driving, Julia That's a good question, thank you for that The next one is about content creation 42% according to Brandshark another US think tank say that 40% of sales reps say that marketing does not or very rarely involve them in the creation of content so it's very often the case that I have also seen and that is that at times marketing creates content and collateral and brochures and pamphlets and it kind of, I don't want to be unkind to the marketers but kind of throws it over the fence to sales and kind of says that's our job done now you guys go and use this and sell and the sales people kind of go well it's not really quite what I need and therefore maybe I might make my own and that creates a problem then that sales people are spending that time not doing selling but trying to do marketing and when marketing is really meant to be doing the marketing so what could we do to remedy that I'll talk about that in a minute but here's the statistic, this is from our own research this is 185 B2B organizations over a 2013-14 period and we asked the reps simply how much of your time do you spend either looking for or modifying marketing content and the numbers were quite surprising so you can see there that quite a few about a third say I spend less than 10% of my time doing that which is great because you want them to find the content quickly and you don't want them to muck around spending too much time modifying the content but well over a third say they spend between 10% and 20% of their time and almost another third said we spend 20 to 30% of our time looking for and modifying content if you take the two middle bars together that's half the sales force is spending between 10% and 30% of the time looking for or modifying marketing content so if you go back to how much of the time those sales have spent selling it could be an explanation why they're not spending more of the time selling so the corollary of that is that if we give them more time by helping to find the content that they need when they need it then that would be supporting them much better the other sad statistic this is from odc which is an international research house and consulting firm now they say only 25% of the sales leads and the collateral that marketing creates is ever used by sales teams I find it an incredible figure 25% that means that 75% does not get used and that's acceptable I just really find that weird but I might just give you a chance to type in here what do you think of that figure in your own organization so I think we're largely agreeing that it's a low figure and I think we need to qualify it a little bit by saying that there's a lot of content that marketing creates that's not meant to be used as a sales tool there's all the thought leadership pieces and there's all the information that goes up on the website and so it's probably not fair to say that 100% of the marketing collateral should be used in the sales process so I think we have to temper that figure with that knowledge as well but I agree with the majority of you that 25% does seem very low and it highlights to me that there's not a lot of feedback going back from the sales people to the marketing people saying how could your collateral be improved and how could it support me better so here's a hypothetical so if we say that we created a feedback loop between sales and marketing so that marketing could actually be informed by sales of not only what do they use but how could it be improved then marketing wouldn't need to guess what actually works for sales and they could make a much better informed decision in terms of how can they better support sales force and everybody would be happy because marketing could focus on marketing and sales could be focusing on selling and each of them would use their own competency to improve the other and it would be a wonderful thing and here's the bugbearer of every sales manager and CFR and CEO this is that two-thirds of sales reps do not achieve their personal sales quota now I have to say this is an American statistic I'm not sure that this applies to Australia as well but let's just say it's a large number that they do not and in the discussion round that I mentioned earlier with the executives we were actually talking about why is that the case and they largely agreed that a lot of reps don't make the number and it's for two reasons one is for probably more than two reasons but one is that it may be that the reps are not as proficient at selling as they could be but the flip side is also that maybe the numbers are not achievable and maybe they're not realistic and I have seen this in very large organisations that the budget is developed and is sent up from the regional head office to the global head office and the global head office says no, these numbers are not good enough do them again, come up with something better and this goes on a couple of times and then in the end the regional sales office so in our case the Australian sales office will put something up that they pretty much know is a big stretch and that gets passed on to the sales people so I kind of feel for the sales people that have these budgets imposed on them of course it must be very frustrating at times I'll just give me a moment to read the questions here Layla's asking a question and she says it's about how you communicate the feedback in a way that marketing would actually listen and apply so Layla if you hit the nail on the head it's got to be a two way thing so the feedback has to be given and the feedback has to be received and it has to be responded to and otherwise the feedback will stop very quickly so I'll come to that a bit further in the webinar so if we just look mathematically at the problem of sales reps not achieving their targets if we could get marketing to better support the sales reps so that they actually perform slightly better so for example if they are more competent at selling because they have subject matter expertise or they have a white paper that will give them a foot in the door to the C suite so the CEO, the CFO, the CMO of an organisation then they might be able to close more deals and they might be able to achieve more of their targets so if we just said that we'll say that 50% now achieve their targets then again for our $100 million apathetical organisation it would mean an additional $17 million in revenue and at 30% margin $4 million in profit so you can see they're not small numbers just for a small improvement in the support of the sales force by marketing so this is kind of what we're talking about when we come to marketing and I just want to mention the research that we did in 2014 and we're currently, sorry, that we published in 2014 and we're currently working on the 2015 edition of this paper it should come out probably in a couple of months probably in the May timeframe as well but I want to, and this paper is available free of charge on my website at terpitasdragupconsulting.com and I just want to show you one of the findings probably the key finding now don't worry that you can't read all this it's not really about the text, it's more about the image what we did here was we asked sales and marketing people separately about 14 different processes that should be in place so let me start again we recommend that there are 14 different processes in place between sales and marketing to help them be aligned and help them to collaborate we asked them, each one of these 14 we asked them, do you have this in place in your organisation? Yes or no and the way the graph can be interpreted is that the more the grey and the orange lines meet in the middle the more they are aligned and the more they agree that they have these things in place so the graph on the left shows the result for organisations whose revenue grew over the preceding 12 months period versus the one on the right where the revenue either stagnated or went backwards now you can see in pretty much one glance that the lines meet much more evenly in the middle for the growth organisations than for the non-growth organisations and that's kind of a key finding of the research namely that there's a direct relationship between sales and marketing alignment and collaboration and the financial success of an organisation I mentioned that we're currently working on the 2015 paper so here's a little glance at it, a preview if we analyse those figures further we find that you're actually twice as likely to be financially successful if your sales and marketing teams are aligned or if you flip it around it means that your risk doubles if they're not aligned your risk of financial performance not going forward not going being positive the risk doubles with less collaborative organisations so there's a strong case to be made for sales and marketing working together and becoming marketing so this is kind of saying the same thing that the poorer the collaboration or the worse the collaboration between sales and marketing the poorer the sales of revenue and profit performance of the organisation but the good news was that the more they work together the more successful the organisation was as well in terms of financial results so what do we say should happen if you look at this graph we have sales speaking to the customer in terms of their sales engagement and we have marketing talking to the customer through the website, collateral, board leadership pieces white papers, conferences, trade shows, etc but if the communication between sales and marketing is not as fantastic as it could be the risk is that the customer will hear two different things and if you know about the buyer's journey so the old sales cycle has given way to the buyer's journey and what it means is that a lot of buyers go online first these days inform themselves about what they can have where they can get it from and what price they should pay and only then are they ready to contact the sales rep so from the sales rep's perspective that means that by the time the buyer is contacting you they've already made up their mind and it's going to be pretty hard for the rep to go and change them, upsell them to something else or sell them something else or upsell them some additional bit because they've already done their research and know exactly what they want and know what they can buy it for and who do you get it from and that if you don't sell it to them then there's two or three others they can so the important thing in the buyer's journey is that we get sales and marketing having a consistent message to the customer so that when the buyer moves away from the buyer's journey into direct contact with the organisation and they actually want to talk to a rep that the messaging remains consistent there's nothing much scarier for a buyer than reading something online and being made to feel confident that the organisation is capable of supplying what I need and then contacting a rep and them telling them something different and because they have a choice to walk away they will walk away so it's absolutely important that we have sales and marketing talking to each other and singing from the same hymn sheet to the customer so what that means then is that we've got to come back to the three cogs that I talked about earlier that in order to get people to collaborate we've got to start with the people domain so we've got to get the people to agree that they want to work together and we do that through a range of assessments seminars, surveys and workshops and basically get them to understand firstly that they're different sales and marketing secondly how they're different and then we move on and say it's okay that you're different because you're both doing different things but if you just could work together it would be so much better for everybody else so the principle is that we want sales to be enabled to provide constructive feedback to marketing on the support that marketing is giving sales and we're talking about your sales leads your collateral, your content your thought leadership pieces, your white papers the website content and everything so we want sales to be empowered to speak out and say look this really works for us this doesn't work for us we don't use this stuff at all and we find this other stuff is really great but as I said earlier if the feedback was just one way and marketing wouldn't respond to the feedback then the feedback would pretty much stop very quickly and we would be back to square one so what absolutely must happen is that marketing responds to the feedback and says thank you very much sales for the feedback that you've given us good and bad, positive and negative and constructive and otherwise and we will respond to that and here's what we're going to do with it so the benefit for sales is that not only are they empowered to provide the feedback but they're also getting information back from marketing in terms of what's going to happen and they see that stuff happens and they feed the information back to marketing so we call this a collaborative cycle a cycle of collaboration a virtuous cycle of collaboration I got it now and basically whereby sales helps marketing so that marketing can help sales and everybody uses their own competency to achieve that objective now where does that leave the customer in all this so firstly if sales and marketing interact with each other and align their messaging then the message going back to the market is going to be consistent no matter whether they're going to be online or face to face with the sales rep so that's a great benefit but what we can also do is we can actually include the customer in that feedback mechanism and that's something that my firm does so we actually go and interview the customers about what do they marketing and sales effort of the organization perceived at the customer end and we come in kind of as Switzerland as a neutral entity and we anonymize everything so that means that they can tell us exactly what they think and they won't get into trouble and nobody will know who said what but the information, the very valuable information goes back to the vendor organization and they can actually make a much more informed decision next time about how they present to the market and what method they will use and what messaging they will do and I have to say the reaction from the customers is usually very positive and they often say to us things like oh, these guys really care about us, don't they? they engage you to find out what we really think and the reason that they would engage us to find out what they really think is because the customer would not tell the sales rep directly what they really think there's too much of a sake there and to do it in a confronting or face-to-face way is not something that everybody is comfortable with but if it's anonymized and it's generalized and it goes through a third party then it's kind of okay to say well, look, their service sucks and they could do this better or they could say I love this thing that they do for us that's really fantastic and I wish they'd do more so either way, it's good information for the vendor to have because then they can improve their ways with the client so the thing is that we can have collaboration between sales and marketing and with the customer as well alright so I promise I was going to talk about what's in it for you and here's some financial ideas that we have found work when you combine sales and marketing into marketing and we're talking about a big increase in revenue commensurate increase in gross profit the not just the lead generation but also the lead conversion rate and also if we have all the information that we need in one place where people can find what they need when they're needed and reduce the time a new rep takes to come up to full speed and that's something in dollar terms as well now we usually provide a financial modeling service for our clients so that they can actually put in their own numbers and we can model four or five different scenarios around it I'm not going to do that here today but what I am going to show you is just one sample calculation and this is based on a couple of people from the Harvard Business School in the 90s and they discovered this phenomenon that if you increase a sales person's productivity by just 5% you can increase the profitability by 20% so what they call it is they call it a four times profit lever now for those of you who think this is a bit extraordinary I'm going to show it to you so let's say we have an organization and we sell something for $100 the thing that we're selling for $100 costs us $60 so that leaves us with $40 gross profit then we have fixed cost and admin cost and direct selling expenses and other expenses in there so let's say the thing that we're selling for $100 is the profit of $10 before tax so we get 10% profit margin now let's look at three scenarios of what would happen if we started reducing the direct selling expenses by just 5% so we're talking about a very conservative figure we're not talking about 10, 20, 30% we're just talking about 5% so let's say we want to reduce or we want to improve the sales productivity by 5% or we want to raise prices by 5% so we've got three different scenarios here and for those of you who are detailed minded you can go through the individual lines but if we look at the bottom end result reducing the direct selling expenses by 5% brings only a 3% improvement in terms of profitability so all those sales people who are hounded by their sales managers of spending too much on a cup of coffee to take out your client show them this figure and it's not really worth arguing over whereas what they should be talking to you about is how can you increase your sales volume by 5% or sell 5% more or sell 5% faster or sell 5% higher margin because that brings you 30% improvement for a 5% improvement in productivity so here's your 4 times lever now also what this example shows in the far right column there is that if you increase your price by 5% you can increase your profitability by 50% and that might explain why your CFO or financial controller or whoever is the financial person in the organization will always say come on you can raise the price a bit more you can get asked a bit more from your client it does make a big difference to the bottom line but unfortunately it's not always realistic we live in a world that's hyper competitive and if you increase your price by 5% you may not make the 50% improvement you may actually make 0% improvement because you don't get the deal so personally I think raising the prices by 5% is probably not as realistic as increasing your sales productivity by 5% but that is highly dependent on the individual organization and I'm just hoping that this is helping you to understand that getting the sales productivity up by supporting the sales force better through the marketing activities actually makes a big difference to the organization or the marketers to put the hand up and say I want to help my sales counterpart to do better and are you on board with me and what that does is for the first time you won't be beaten up on the budget and on the what are you contributing to sales you're actually taking the bull by the horns and you're being proactive and showing the CEO some leadership and because it was your initiative and you said to the sales manager are you with me it means that they have to be on board with you but it's still your leadership showing through so it's kind of like a really good career move and it's a win-win scenario and it would actually help the organization if it comes through so I would encourage you to have a good look at these figures here and say wow I can really make a contribution to those and so there's your tip for the day there now if you want to see what this looks like for your own organization you can actually go to my website and there is something that's called the ROI check and you can put your own figures in and you'll find that it'll give you the result in terms of if I improve my productivity by 8% that you put in say 5% what would that look like for my organization and I think you'd be surprised at the results just one caveat there the Harvard Business Review formula works the other way around as well so if you don't achieve improvement in productivity or if the productivity actually goes backwards the numbers amplified the other way as well so you get a bigger loss in the same order of magnitude so it has a big negative impact if it goes backwards so it's best to be proactive and and try to improve the current status quo so I'm going to now open the floor to questions and and also what I would like you to do is to type in your questions and also to say what was good for you today and Sarah has very kindly put up a survey for you to fill in as well so there's plenty of stuff for you to do ask questions, tell me what you thought was good for you today and fill in the survey and I'll just be waiting for you to type things in I think we might go to Layla's question as well regarding what you were speaking about a few slides back so she said there is also the issue of timing sometimes by the time the changes have been made so I'm thinking about marketing material and collateral it is time for another change so how do we bridge the gap on timing yes thank you Layla I saw that question I didn't really have an opportunity to answer it to me it comes back to the quality of communication so the quality of communication means how well do we communicate it also means how quickly do we communicate and then how quickly do we respond so if everything goes well in marketing sales and marketing would be so aligned that they would not need to wait firstly they would not need to wait for a problem to occur before they talk about it but secondly is once they do talk about it they also have the ability to make a decision very quickly and to respond to it very quickly so if you improve the collaboration between sales and marketing and if that improves the level of communication and the quality of communication then you should be able to respond to these changes much more quickly and what's important much more quickly with a an agreed with an agreed set of steps with an agreed action and it comes back to communication the quality of it and the speed of response but if marketing works all this should be in place does that answer your question Leila? Great I can't see any more questions coming through but what you might do on the follow up email that will be sent out along with the recording and the PowerPoint presentation is it okay if we put your direct details on there Peter for people to contact you should they have any other questions about today? Yep absolutely now if you're still keen I'm interested to find out what part of the presentation was actually good for you so if you have any comments feel free to type those in as well otherwise we'll leave you to the survey Yep excellent and thank you for everyone completing that and thank you once again for everyone joining our business skills series and a huge thank you to you Peter for joining us today very very very inspirational insights there and I'm sure everyone learned a thing or two that they can take away and hopefully make a huge impact or even a small impact to the bottom line you never know so thank you everyone for joining thank you for completing the survey and we look forward to seeing you on future webinars thanks so much for your time and enjoy the rest of your day bye for now