Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference Speaker Interview: Wells Fargo

Tracey Fanelli

Senior Vice President

Wells Fargo

Q.  What is your role in your sales/marketing organization?

I’m Wells Fargo’s senior vice president in charge of the marketing team for our Treasury Management business.  Our reach is broader than most traditional marketing organizations in that, in addition to traditional marketing communications, we are also responsible for sales content and sales asset development, including proposals, RFPs, and presentations.

Q. How is your organization structured?

I was brought into Wells Fargo almost eight years ago to establish a marketing team and we have always been responsible for developing both marketing programs and related sales content and materials. Nine months ago, after our merger with Wachovia, we moved marketing into the sales organization to help integrate marketing and sales and focus on revenue generation.

Being a part of the sales organization has given us the opportunity to directly enhance the sales process and group, align our marketing and sales efforts, and receive senior sales executive support.  The new organizational structure has been very effective because we’re now creating content and assets that are meaningful and valuable to the sales organization.

Q.  What are the biggest sales/marketing challenges your company has faced/is facing?

During the financial crisis and at the beginning of our merger with Wachovia, we had the opportunity to position Wells Fargo as a thought leader in Treasury Management.  Our marketing team made a strategic decision to move away from a product focus toward a more customer or business-challenge perspective. We’re in a very competitive business that has existed for a long time, so one of the big challenges is differentiating ourselves from our competition.  Another is making our sales and marketing materials and approach more customer focused.  We’ve always been a customer-focused organization but our marketing and sales materials and methods did not necessarily reflect that.  We also noticed we were talking about ourselves and our products a lot of the time versus talking about the customer and their business challenges. And from an internal perspective, we were struggling with getting sales to take notice and use what the marketing organization was creating for them.

Q.  What does your company do well to align marketing and sales?  What needs work?

The new organizational structure is working well because we’re more aware of the challenges that the sales organization faces in their day-to-day activities.  Now we’re structured and prepared to support them with messages, content, and sales tools that help make them more effective.

Last year we started working with Corporate Visions on messaging and training. We’ve seen a remarkable difference in our sales approach and success rate. One thing we’ve been doing is going out and soliciting success stories – what we call internal successes – that are not necessarily customer successes, but rather the sales person’s effectiveness with the Power Messaging approach.  We have gotten some great insight into how different sales people have approached customers and been successful. In situations where our sales team has struggled with moving a deal forward, they’ve been using Power Messaging to change the conversation and close more deals.

Where we still have work to do is not necessarily the execution, but the adoption.  Our sales team has been very proactive and eager to adopt a Power Messaging approach and they’ve been very successful using it, but we’re still in the early stages of rolling this out and we would like even greater adoption across the organization.  And our marketing team is working hard to keep up with all the new requests for sales materials!

Q.  What can attendees expect to learn by attending your presentation at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference?

As business-to-business marketers, we have to take responsibility for sales enablement.  We need to understand the sales process and the customer buying cycle, and be able to take our marketing messages one step further and create sales content and tools to help generate revenue for our organizations. I’ll talk about how to partner with your sales organization, gain a better understanding of the sales process, and create the tools that the sales team needs to be successful. I’ll also discuss where you should go next after beginning the process.  How do you make sure you develop a short- and long-term strategy that you can sustain?  How do you continue to engage your sales organization?

Q. What are you looking forward to most at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference? 

I’m looking forward to meeting other marketers that are maybe further down the path of marketing and sales alignment, and hearing what their best practices are and what’s worked and hasn’t worked.  I also enjoy talking with people in other sales organizations to learn about new things that we can possibly adopt to bring value to our sales team.

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If you’d like to meet Tracey and some of the other brilliant minds that have broken the status quo, aligned marketing and sales, and spearheaded lasting change in their organizations, please join us for our Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, taking place in Chicago, IL, Sept. 18-20, 2012.  Register now!

Filed under: Marketing, Message Creation Tagged: customer-focused, Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, Merger, sales tools, Wells Fargo