Speechless Salespeople

Sybase in the database market of the late 1990s and early 2000s was a niche player in a world where Oracle was at the peak of its market power and IBM held the large-account business with DB2. Four percent market share in Germany sounds small. With major banks in the high-availability and replication niche, Sybase was however very solidly placed — the product-market fit in the narrow segment was not the problem.

The problem sat one floor below: in how the company had organised itself to translate that market advantage into revenue. It was a Product-Company-Fit question disguised as a marketing brief.

I came in as Head of Marketing Central Europe. My brief in one sentence: deliver to sales everything they need to sell successfully. We started with the classics — sales materials, campaigns, events, pre-sales content. The task became something else over time. It became co-architecture of the sales operating model.

I was a regular participant in the weekly sales meeting, presenting our marketing actions and ongoing enablement programmes. The pattern that consolidated in those meetings is familiar to anyone who has worked in a sales organisation: the salespeople complained. About missing materials. About lead quality. About demo environments. About pricing latitude. About pre-sales support. The list had new items every week, and old items that hadn't been ticked off.

The sales lead — Rick Reyneveld — and I, in a discussion, arrived at the obvious question: what if we took the complaints seriously and worked through them consistently? Not selectively. Not symbolically. In full. Everything they say is missing — we deliver it.

The full list took twelve weeks to clear. Some items were done in a week. Others — above all the lead definition and the test-licence mechanism — required negotiation with pre-sales, with the international licence team, with operations.

What came back from the salespeople was substantial — not trivial, not bypassable. A clear lead definition: what counts as a lead at all? We agreed: someone who has signalled interest through a concrete action. Attendance at an event, download of a document, a request. Not a business card from a trade-show bowl. Demos that pre-sales and sales could present together. Simple test installations and test licences, with which customers could evaluate the product in their own environment without every trial triggering escalation to licence management. And several smaller, manageable points on sales material, pricing clarity and competitive battlecards.

But we stayed at it. Every week in the meeting the same point: what has been added, what have we ticked off, what is still open.

The second scene: John Chen's visit. A few weeks later, a visit by John Chen — Sybase's CEO — was announced. A dinner with a talk in a high-end hotel in Frankfurt was planned. The salespeople's job: bring guests. Reyneveld and I expected this would be hard — customer acquisition under hotel-menu conditions is not a slam dunk in any awake sales organisation.

I came into the next meeting with the idea of an internal contest. The salesperson with the most attendees at the event wins a weekend on Sylt — high-end accommodation, fine dining, all on the company, with companion. From the meeting itself came the joke from a salesperson — by private plane — which I picked up. The joke became part of the prize. And that established the counterpart that carried the contest in tone: the person with the fewest attendees gets a lunch with the local managing director.

Both poles were communicated openly. Both were introduced humorously in the meeting. No one was forced to participate — the contest explained itself through its own rules.

1. Marketing in a B2B sales organisation doesn't build content. Marketing co-architects the sales operating model. What is produced as visible marketing output — materials, campaigns, events — is the smaller half of the job. The larger half is the operating model itself: what counts as a lead, how demos are available, how test licences work, how the competition is observed, what incentives are placed where. Whoever understands marketing as a content function leaves the larger lever unused. Whoever understands it as co-architecture has access to the lever that structurally influences sales performance.
2. Complaints in a sales team are more often a hiding place than a need — and only a fully cleared list makes the difference visible. As long as something is always missing, there is always a reason not to attribute performance to the individual. That is humanly understandable, but it isn't in the interest of the strong salespeople on the team — who don't need that defensive architecture and are run beneath their value inside it. Clearing a list completely is methodologically expensive, because many points are not trivial. But it is the sharpest available diagnosis of where the sales organisation actually stands.
3. A good sales operating model is built around the strong salesperson, not the weaker one. The strong salesperson wants early leads, easy test mechanisms, latitude in the sales process. The weaker salesperson wants the customer ready to sign. Whoever optimises the system for the weaker salesperson — everything must be pre-qualified, every lead sales-ready, no trial without escalation — makes the strong salespeople slower and protects the weaker ones from the diagnosis of their weakness. That is Product-Company-Fit loss at the sales interface, and it is the kind of loss that doesn't show up in any forecast sheet, because the sheet only shows the sum, not the distribution beneath.