Harmony Translates to Sales

You have only one best shot at systemic change. That’s the lesson Alan Scott learned in his first few months at Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, the business-to-business segment that provides some 22 percent of the venerable publishing and information company’s revenues — and nearly 70 percent of its profits.

by Gwen Moran

Scott became chief marketing officer of the unit in 2006, after Dow Jones acquired Factiva, a news aggregator, where he had also served as CMO.

Many companies suffer from a crippling divide between sales and marketing. At this key unit of Dow Jones, whose stock price has vastly underperformed peers like the New York Times and Washington Post over the last two decades, the problem was particularly acute. “We needed to find out how we get these two organizations talking and working together instead of yelling and screaming at each other,” Scott says. He recognized that his ascension offered a one-time opportunity for fundamental overhaul.

So Scott, 44, met with his counterpart in global sales, senior vice president William Voltmer, and the two began to build a better approach to finding and selling to customers.

The first step: prioritize prospects. As obvious as that sounds, there was no existing examination of who was buying the company’s products and services, why and when. Prioritizing would thus enable salespeople to allocate their time on any given day based on the stage in the sales cycle and customers’ inherent likelihood to buy.

Next, with a focused target list, Scott could rework the marketing to appeal directly to them. “Rather than talking about the brand in generic, flowing terms,” he says, “we needed to be more pointed on the buyer’s pains and opportunities.” Corporate-imaging messages (“Inspiration only strikes once”) gave way to segment-specific pitches, such as a series targeted at salespeople needing lead-generation services (“First place doesn’t come to second best”).

The up-close look at sales prospects and buyers was a start — Scott made it a priority to track them. His team created a proprietary database that would aggregate every contact the company had with the prospect: What information was requested and received? More importantly, what was the link between such information, and whether and when a purchase was made? Suddenly, the quarreling departments were conjoined: Scott and Voltmer could better determine the point where marketing leads became sales leads.

Another plus: They could now identify high-risk customers, so the sales team could concentrate on prospects who were truly strong. Scott began his career in sales, at 3M, experience that helped. “He understands what it’s like to be a salesperson on a day-to-day basis and how marketing needs to support that,” says Richard Eldh, cofounder of SiriusDecisions, a Connecticut market-research firm that has consulted for Dow Jones Enterprise Media since 2003.

Scott was also fortunate that Voltmer was open to breaking down traditional sales and marketing roles and creating a more open information flow. “We see CMOs who go to their heads of sales and tell them what they need to do,” Eldh says. “Alan got buy-in from [Voltmer] and from the CEO. Everyone was open to this integration. His communication style, which is very good, made this work.”

But Scott gives his new-kid-on-the-block status much credit. “When you come in new, you have some grace period — it’s between six and 18 months — where you can get away with just about anything,” he says. “People don’t really know who you are, they have high hopes for you and they’re willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.” While it’s difficult to quantify precise improvement (Dow Jones Enterprise Media logged $103 million in profits in 2006), Scott estimates that the reorganization led directly to additional sales in the “low seven figures” in 2006, the year it was implemented, and will generate “high seven figures” this year.

That’s significant growth just from better information-sharing. As Rupert Murdoch begins tinkering with his new $5 billion investment, perhaps there’s a larger-scale model for him there.

Executive Summary

• Sales and marketing at Dow Jones Enterprise Media were bickering, not sharing information — no small problem.

• New CMO Alan Scott felt he had a six- to 18-month honeymoon in which to effect change.

• Sharing information and tracking contacts leads to smarter prospecting — and incremental sales.