It’s third-and-long for many B2B companies.

The football season has returned and along with it, the inspirational goal line speeches used by B2B sales managers to get their teams back in the game, back on the field of play and off to a better, winning season. As the decades-old cheer goes: The team was in a huddle, the coach was at the head, they had a conversation and this is what they said:

“We’re going to fight, score more, and generally play harder this year. Our goal is to increase sales, and to do this we are going to increase lead generation and new customer acquisition.”

Score more sales -- that's the finding of a recent Global Spec survey of manufacturing companies. The report, called “8 Trends in Industrial Marketing,” offered this finding: Generating leads to get new customers is the #1 goal of manufacturing companies this year. The survey observed some related trends, including the ongoing shift in marketing dollars away from print media to web sites, email campaigns, and other internet services such as, ahem, Global Spec.

But let’s not get distracted by the motivations behind so many surveys published on the internet these days. Buying more online promotional space is logical, equally as logical as another “trend” reported by many metrics providers, which is that what business leaders really need is more data, before they can make any decisions of consequence.

First and ten, do it again. At some point, it’s not about the numbers. Just like in the world of market research, quantitative survey scores are a distraction, when what you need to measure is not efficiency, but effectiveness. You can measure the game in dollars, percentage points or yards, but the dynamics for business growth are still the same: Winning companies, just like winning football teams, build winning “programs.” They do so 1) by recruiting players to execute your company’s vision, mission and distinctive value propositions, 2) by communicating and incenting teamwork to cultivate market segment recognition of this value, and 3) by empowering and enforcing a winning culture.

It’s a game of value definition and value recognition; and sooner or later, a winning business leader stops focusing on the first-and-ten hash marks and starts seeing the forces at work across the larger field of play.

From a top-down perspective, the relationship between branding, marketing and sales are readily observable. The dynamic is there to see. All a leader has to do is climb up into the coach’s box to get an informed, holistic, top-down perspective on it all.

jb