AMA May 2015 Luncheon

The Sales Gap Model: Creating lift by moving McKinsey's CDJ theory into a practical, sales driven, marketing process.

Guest Speaker: Sean Doyle – Co-Founder, Principal, Director of Strategy of FitzMartin

Sales and management teams always desire more sales, but few marketers know how to identify the barriers to growth. We thought buying digital ads, marketing automation tools and content would be the path to ROI, but we did it still without understanding HOW prospects buy. So companies continue to bludgeon their way through prospects doors with selling incentives, aggressive sales behavior goals, and flashing and expensive marketing propositions. But the smart ones, they sense there is a better way. And there is.

FitzMartin’s Sales Gap Model is a compliment to McKinsey's CDJ. That sounds like semantics, but here’s what it means: FitzMartin’s process is rooted in a behavioral change framework. McKinsey's model seeks to aggregate different buying channels and styles into a loop.

Those are two very different critters. They are definitely complementary, but they aren't interchangeable. Sean’s thinking, vision and experience are focused on helping clients truly align marketing and sales with one another and jointly with the customer. The FitzMartin process is linear and can be used to create "rational" buying experiences. This is a major “a-ha” for B2B marketers because it has repercussions for more than just tools but also behavior. It puts marketers in a position of serving as counselors/advisors to sales and across the entire enterprise.

Sean will share his lead tool, a sales gap analysis, and demonstrate how the Sales Gap framework was used by one of the 50 largest banks in the world to create marketing and sales alignment. He also will review the efficacy of marketing tools and sales behaviors (without too much detail, of course), and explain how that client created $100,000,000’s in sales (fee, loan and deposit growth) using this process.

Sean promises to share:

• How you can identify barriers to sales
• How you can advance your professional marketing skills from “I think that will work” to “this will work because…”
• How to collaborate with sales in pursuit of today’s revenue (and management in pursuit of tomorrow’s growth)
• A quantitative tool to evaluate sales process and behavior
• A quantitative way to evaluate creative and predict its efficacy

As a principal of FitzMartin, Sean is a leading mind and voice on B2B sales and marketing strategy. Particularly adroit at applying the science of behavioral change to sales and marketing communications, Sean drives the team at FitzMartin to focus on the needs of business and business leaders. “Few companies fail for lack of clever products or services. Most companies fail for a lack of revenue. If nothing gets sold, nothing else matters.” is an oft heard principle at our office.

Over 25 years and 5,000+ projects and client engagements, Sean has worked with businesses to solve the most pressing sales and marketing challenges: planning, positioning, and branding of course, but then it gets interesting… growth initiatives, sales optimization, metrics and analytics, high value hard to reach sales programs, customer experience mapping and design, sales technology integration, sales and marketing leadership coaching, even fractional CMO engagements.  Bottom line: few possess deeper expertise in helping mid-sized B2B businesses sell to the right customers. Sean is one of reasons why FitzMartin is a proven catalyst for growth.

Every marketer when asked for previous clients will pull out the biggest names they can. For him it’s Georgia Pacific, the Southeastern Conference (yes, the sport empire), BBVA Compass and a few others. But the truth is Sean has spent most of his career not working for international banks or the Fortune 1000 but in $5MM to $80MM companies that make up most of American business.

Sean's first book, Enabling Profit, is a guide for an executive in charge of marketing but not trained to do it! His vision in writing this book is simple, but big: to profoundly change how leaders of small- to mid-sized B2B businesses direct the marketing function of their businesses and to inspire, encourage, and even empower business leaders to be more successful.

Sean and his wife have a daughter in college. When not at the office, it’s a safe bet that he’s traveling. They love the mountains and the sea; which is appropriate since Sean loves both fly-fishing and food. Occasionally you might even find him on a sport touring motorcycle! As a family, the Doyle’s also enjoy community and missions trips with their church, Cahaba Park Presbyterian.