Hello there. Good morning.
Good Afternoon. Good evening.
Welcome back for one more of this Strategizer,
our hub for sales strategy,
the place where the smart sales people meet.
Today, I invited a high executive who is a specialist in marketing and sales.
Please welcome my very good friend, Humberto Di Biase.
Humberto, thank you very much for coming.
It's a pleasure.
So, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself seven year experience.
Okay. So, I graduated in
Business Administration actually and Economy in Corporate Finance.
So, nothing really very much connected with sales or marketing.
But after that, I started working and studying marketing, did my MBA.
I did some courses abroad and then came back to
Brazil to work in companies such as Unilever in trade marketing and marketing,
Buyer Healthcare, LG, Lenovo, consulting companies also.
And I had the opportunity to go from marketing, just marketing,
to marketing and sales,
from marketing sales and trade marketing and then overall management of the situation.
So, this is pretty much my experience in around 22 years actually.
So, in your professional career,
having directed these marketing and sales areas as you told us,
you have broad experience to evaluate the results
coming from the relationship between the areas?
Yes.
Especially, market and sales?
Yes.
What are the negative effects of the lack of alignment and
integration to achieve the company's strategic objectives
between these areas specifically?
Well, in a nutshell, if you don't have alignment
actually between sales and marketing areas,
you will never ever reach your strategic objectives.
You can even try, you can have a strong leader that
will force you to do that in sales or in marketing,
and the brand is already very supported in branding like brewery companies in Brazil,
like car companies in Brazil and so on.
But if sales don't buy you as a marketing guy,
if sales don't really want to work with you and they
don't believe in what you are doing in marketing at the end of the day,
you'll never achieve your objectives.
It can be achieved in short-term.
So, in this next six months or nine months or even a year,
but your strategic objectives won't happen,
because when we talk about strategic objectives,
we're talking about PNL,
we're talking about gross sales, net sales,
gross margin, expenses or costs,
whatever you want to say,
and profit in the end of the day.
So, one of those parts will not balance well.
Have you experienced conflict?
I mean, how did you react to correct and eliminate
these conflicts between these areas when you took overall control between them?
Yes. I experienced many conflicts.
And many of the conflicts are mainly because most of the companies
or a lot of companies don't have a culture that's really embedded in the company.
Culture.
If you have culture,
it's the strategy in the breakfast.
So you've got to have culture at the end of the day.
But when you don't have that,
you go into many companies where you see,
and this is very cliche,
but it happens that you see sales working in one side,
marketing working in the other side.
You don't really correlate and you don't see the results at the end of
the day or you can see the results in the short-term,
but this never happens,
and you end up with the biggest problems of all.
So the main planning of finance will run the company.
Marketing and sales will not do that anymore.
Sales will sell whatever they have in the inventory because they were not connected.
So, the major conflicts at brands are working in niche.
And the second one, you don't have a clear leadership that makes them communicate well.
You can have the culture, but they don't,
I used to say that they don't have the first and the last coffee of the day together,
marketing and sales together.
So this is very necessary.
In how to integrate that,
to integrate that actually we need leadership.
So you need a very strong leader at the end of the day.
It can be your vice president or marketing sales or
CEO or even one of the heads of marketing and sales actually
to start building this relationship and the last and the first coffee of
the day working together for the objective and a lot of focus at the end of the day.
And if you don't have that,
you'll fairly end up with this alignment again.
Given your experience, how would you build an integration between the market and sales?
Do you have something to guide the people who are starting now in this career?
Some hints to integrate them.
Well, first of all, it's not a competition.
It is the same company and you're trying to do and deliver the best results and
strategic results at the end of the day.
And being a sales guy is very hard because one day is a month,
one month is a year,
so you have to be very active in this process.
And I ruled actually and I was managing sales and marketing together.
So this is one of the ways.
So you have the same leader actually for both areas,
and he can give a good balance between these things.
And the other one is that marketeers nowadays they
have to understand that marketing and even trade and finance and other areas,
they are support areas for sales.
Everybody wants to sell.
You go to a newspaper and you don't see it.
The campaign of Unilever is going better
than the campaign or Procter and Gamble or RACT AMBAC, you don't see that.
But you see us, as a true leader would say,
Unilever is not selling that well in the first quarter.
Procter and Gamble is exceeding results.
And so, it's all about numbers in the end of day.
So it is all about sales at the end of the day.
It's all about the profit that you bring to the stakeholders.
So, try to make the company, as a whole,
understand what are the roles and what is the moment of the company result.
So, in your professional experience,
you had the opportunity to observe cases of high integration,
the opposite of the other.
Could you share an example?
Well, assuming that you have a culture in the company, or even not,
a very good example is that when you put
this guys together and you give them the same KPIs.
We don't have a marketing KPI.
So it's not a branding development or when is this or that. This is okay.
Your team is going to have this KPIs.
So if you have this strong alignment,
also the same KPIs between the areas,
so marketing and sales leaders have KPIs which are based on your PNL,
it's very easy to have this high and have a very strong integration.
And give marketing people responsibility for numbers,
give salespeople responsibility for people and development and
knowledge about the product and what they're going to do.
In a nutshell, what are
the three most important points of adaptation that need to be controlled?
Well, I think what I would talk about the three most important things,
it's very hard to give the three most important,
but I'll give you three technical things that I believe are very important also.
And the first one is master your market.
You've got to know everything about your market.
You've got to know about your competitors,
about your pricing, about your sales, about your products,
about how do you sell and why do you sell also.
This is extremely important.
The second one, master numbers.
You got to be able to feed yourself from the PNL,
from the numbers and the results that are in there.
If you do that, you can read the company.
You can see where the company is growing or not, actually.
The third one is,
you have to master
also people management at the end of the day because people were selling.
People were giving you the results at the end of the day.
So these are the three technical stuff that I want to.
But, I have to tell you one more thing also.
There are also other things that you got to do.
You've got to be extremely persuasive,
and you can build that.
You got to improve your negotiation skills all the time.
This is something that if you are a sales guy,
you already have inside of you.
And this may seem like a Yoda,
Star Wars stuff, but it's not.
You have to become your product.
You have to live that.
You have to live that and have to internalize,
actually, to be a good sales guy in the end of the day.
Would you like to add something for them,
to share with them about some hints,
some advice, how to pursue a successful sales career?
Well, it is a very hard career.
Based on this business administration business,
I think it's the most difficult career.
So my advice is don't.
But if you are right there, actually in the end of the day,
make sure that you look and you understand everything that you're doing every day,
make sure that you're looking for a good leader
that can lead you actually through each this process.
And again, become your product. You've got to know everything.
You've got to know technical assistance.
You've got to know engineering.
You've got to know your pricing.
You've got to know the consumers who are in marketing.
And then, it's very hard for you to fail in the end of the day.
So, focus on what you have to deliver to your consumer,
and this is going to be a very successful path for you.
Wonderful. And also, again,
thank you very much for staying with us.
Great. Thank you very much.
If you want to talk to me or something like that,
you can look for me in social media or in my consulting company,
which is Hau Chu Consulting.
And that's my pleasure again. Thank you very much.
You're very welcome. And you,
thank you very much for staying with us.
Stay tuned for more of the Strategizer to you there.
Nelson YoshidaPh.D., MBA, B.Eng.
Samantha MazzeroMSc, MBA, BS Math
Cesar RodriguesSpecialist Professor
Edson ItoSpecialist Professor
