On Improving the Sales and Marketing Relationship

A world in which marketing works productively with sales and vice versa can feel elusive. Like any relationship, it requires sustained effort and leaders must take steps to make that effort visible.

From an organization’s standpoint, how can we define “working productively”?

• Sales must sell. Performance is measured in good revenue generated.
• Marketing must help sales sell.

Beyond telling marketing to generate more quality leads, here are some things that sales and marketing can do to get things working again.

1. Change what’s measured
2. Turn off lead scoring, for now
3. Create a service level agreement for timely sales follow-up
4. Meet regularly with your counterpart
5. Find multipliers and collaborate
6. Agree to create balance
7. Make it clear that you are doing things differently
8. Create structural change when needed
9. Encourage disagreement over opinions, not facts
10. Discourage negative cliques

1) Change what’s measured

No, this isn’t a suggestion to buy yourself time. Are marketing qualified leads really the most accurate measurement of marketing’s impact on sales?

Tell your teams that you are reviewing definitions of key performance indicators across sales and marketing. If you’re in marketing, find a way to measure what matters to sales: pipeline influenced and pipeline generated. Overlay costs in your pipeline influence analysis to gain a defendable, full-picture of what’s working and what’s not.

We plan a future post on how to manually create a pipeline influence analysis using data from Salesforce.com. For now, a shameless plug: QFlow.ai provides multi-touch pipeline and win attribution and the ability to overlay ongoing costs out of the box.

Restructuring what you measure is another form of structural change. Leaders will emerge, those treading water will sink, and it will serve to add focus across the organization.

2) Turn off lead scoring, for now

Unless your marketing department can afford to bring on an in-house data engineer with machine learning experience (to prepare data, train a model, monitor results, etc.), lead scoring usually amounts to somebody’s wet finger held in the air. Sales starts ignoring automated alerts and true hand-raises slip through the crack.

If you are not ready to deploy machine learning to score leads, turn off lead scoring and raise the bar on your MQL definition. Keep the definition for an MQL simple for now. An MQL is a lead who raises her/his hand asking for sales to get in touch.

3) Create a service level agreement for timely sales follow-up

Many of the tactics suggested in this post ask marketing to make changes to their operations. When marketing agrees to maintain a defined level of quality, sales should establish an SLA for timely follow-up on inbound MQLs. This should be measured in minutes & seconds, not hours. It drastically improves conversions and helps the marketing team know everyone has skin in the game.

4) Meet regularly with your counterpart

Set up bi-weekly 1:1s with your counterpart in sales / marketing, and don’t miss them. During this meeting, review metrics generated since your last 1:1 around leads generated and pipeline created. How many leads did marketing hand off to sales? Are the titles and personas what you’d expect? If not, is there a learning there?

A good B2B marketing leader should attempt to attain a sales leader-like grasp of pipeline and deal flow. First, understand the common characteristics of leads from a firmographic, demographic, and behavioral standpoint. How do those characteristics differ when sales wins and when sales loses a deal? Second, understand common sales motions. What combination of sales activities complement the behavioral pattern leads are showing as they interact with marketing campaigns? Where are deals getting stuck?

Share learnings from this 1:1 with your marketing team. The marketing team must operate with sales context. Too often, teams march ahead with unproven assumptions about why their customers are buying. What follows are the same old broken tactics.

5) Find multipliers and collaborate

Multipliers are those whose efforts have more than an additive effect on your organization. These are the individuals whose work has a multiplying effect on those around them. If you’re on the marketing team, identify multipliers on the sales team. This most likely will be a Sales Engineer or Sales Ops professional, but could be anyone.

Create a channel with them for feedback on positioning and assets. Listen to their feedback and go out of your way to give credit when feedback is incorporated. It costs nothing to make your partner in sales the hero if she/he had a good idea for messaging or a marketing asset.

It might come back in the form of karma. Or better yet, more leads and more bookings.

6) Agree to create balance

Establish the understanding that marketing works for sales. This does not mean marketing takes marching orders from sales. It means that through a combination of short term tactics and longer-term programs, marketing will create the awareness and tools that will help sales sell.

Accordingly, sales leaders must learn to achieve balance in its team’s demands of the marketing team. There is the specific (“I need help on a custom deck for a big deal”) and the broad (“Our product is great, but no one knows who we are!”).

Marketing leaders need to stay close to their team’s interactions with the sales team. The idea is to maintain a healthy balance of top-of-the-funnel and mid-funnel level activity. Encourage collaboration between teams, but step in if you see a hyper-reactive focus on tactics to close a deal or a myopic focus on larger “branding” initiatives. Both come at the cost of helping sales sell, especially in the latter case where help is needed to win low-hanging fruit.

Marketing works for sales. The best marketing leaders manage their team’s time and resources to help close deals and simultaneously invest in next quarter and beyond. It’s not a quota-carrying sales rep’s job to be thinking much beyond this quarter and next. Marketing must support the organization in a balanced way.

The best sales leaders understand this dynamic. They keep a pulse on their team’s one-off requests. For time-consuming requests, the best sales leaders drop a Slack or a phone call to the marketing manager to provide some context.

7) Make it clear that you are doing things differently

So you and your counterpart have decided “we’ll do things differently.” What can you do tactically to actually make that happen? You’ll need to make an ongoing effort to market the effort that you’re making — to your teams and the executive team.

Most of your staff can recall an experience where the healthy tension between marketing and sales turned into a blame game. Crappy leads were slung over the fence to sales. Sales reps filtered their inbox to ignore MQLs. Sales didn’t follow up on MQLs quickly enough. Marketing wasn’t grasping why customers truly were buying. The list goes on. Together, these experiences create post-traumatic sales & marketing dysfunction syndrome. It exists to some extent for everyone on your teams.

Acknowledge that post-traumatic sales & marketing dysfunction syndrome exists and communicate that “we are different.” In a post-pandemic virtual workplace, it is doubly important to find ways to communicate this. Nature abhors a vacuum. Don’t miss opportunities to communicate.

8) Create structural change when needed

Structural change is your opportunity to reset the relationship between sales and marketing. It may be that the easiest way for your organization to reset the relationship is to remove a key player. This creates a vacuum for influencers and leaders sans titre to step up and be a part of the solution. The people you want on your team during a transition like this put their heads down and collaborate genuinely.

If you have people creating divisions across your organization, consider walking them to the door as soon as possible. Talk to HR and make a plan to exit them from the business tomorrow. In an ideal world, this doesn’t include your top-performing sales rep. In an ideal world, it doesn’t include your heavy-hitting campaigns manager. But if it does, remember that the short-term pain is worth it for the organization and your credibility.

Make it clear that the expectation is continuous improvement. Everyone has a choice. They can choose to be part of the solution — or they can choose not to be a member of the team moving forward.

9) Encourage disagreement over opinions, not facts

Encourage healthy tension between marketing and sales. Eliminate behavior that could be construed as whining or undermining in nature. The latter can metastasize in the form of anecdotes or opinions, which are often insufficiently based on hard evidence. “I heard the sales team was positioning x as y.” “I heard marketing is using a new call to action.”

For marketing: is y a measurably better way to position than x ? For sales: is there data from marketing’s CTA experiments that could inform your email templates? Too often, the answer is “we don’t know.”

Build a culture that is data-driven. One where any debates over opinions are opinions over interpretation of data. Encourage disagreement when it comes to the interpretation of data and facts. But forcefully put an end to debates that aren’t rooted in fact or data. And when there are debates over data integrity, put your most capable team member on fixing the issue.

10) Discourage negative cliques

It’s natural in any organization for in-group and out-group cliques to develop. In some cases, they will develop in a way that benefits the organization. This can serve to inspire and drive positive behavior for an organization. For example, “these last guys had no idea what they were doing in terms of x, y, z… let’s show everyone we know what we’re doing.”

Encourage constructive criticism, while preparing your team to get radically transparent if they have something negative to say. When your events manager says to a product marketing manager, “did you hear how Jeffrey is positioning the product?”, ask “what are you doing about it? have you spoken with Jeffrey about it?”

Force your teams to look within anytime you sense things starting to get negative. If there is merit to their observation, force an adult conversation.