Sales and Marketing Are Feuding (And It's Costing You)

Sales is blaming the lead quality. The marketing team is blaming the fact that they don’t truly understand the true needs of a prospect. CEOs and business owners, they’re just blaming the lack of communication between both departments. Honestly, sales and marketing alignment is absolutely crucial, and we’re going to tackle it on today’s podcast.

Hi, my name’s Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing and challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing towards planning an intentional marketing strategy.

And I’m going to preface this podcast today by saying that this alignment issue, it doesn’t just apply to larger businesses that have fully fledged marketing and sales teams. But also, this issue, the sales and marketing alignment issue, applies to small and medium-sized businesses, some of whom don’t even have marketing and sales teams. So even if you don’t have that fully fledged marketing or sales team, alignment can play an integral role in your sales and marketing and overall business planning.

Today, we’re going to fix the issue that you have between your marketing and sales alignment. Because alignment, honestly, it can be a bit of a game changer for organisations of all sizes. It really is really evident in companies with solid alignment of how they can achieve higher growth rates. But the first question we’re going to tackle is: how do you even know if you’ve got an alignment problem that you need to fix?

Honestly, you’ll know. If you’re running any type of sales and marketing strategy yourself, as a small business owner, you’re going to start having a look for some things like inconsistent messaging. Some messaging that is potentially going to confuse potential clients and erode their trust. You’re going to see a bit of a misalignment between your business’s core values and some of the campaigns and the social media and the posts that you’re sending and the EDMs that you’re sending out. You’re going to start to notice a bit of a disconnected customer journey. And what that does is it’s going to actually result in poor customer experiences over the long run.

Remember that the marketing game is a game that aims to delight your potential customer from their very first interaction with you and your company to well after they actually finish working with you. Because when they finish working with you, that’s when they become super fans. And that’s when the word of mouth, referral, this is what our businesses are all working really hard to create. So we need to create these amazing, delightful customer experiences from the first time they ever see your business through until they become those super fans.

So you’ve got a massive problem if your key marketing message is saying one thing, and then your sales strategy, your sales scripts, your sales emails, or your sales team is selling something completely different. Customers, we don’t want them to think that they’re dealing with different organisations.

If you’re within a large organisation, you’re not only going to see it just within misalignment in terms of your content and your core values, you’re going to see it in the actual culture between the sales and the marketing teams. That culture of blame starts when targets start not to be getting hit. Sales, again, as I said at the start of the podcast, they’re going to blame marketing for the lead quality. They’re going to blame marketing for the volume that’s coming through. While marketing, they’re going to be sitting there blaming sales for not understanding what’s a good quality lead.

And what this is doing is this is creating this culture of confusion. It’s going to cause your company to miss targets, and it’s just going to cause a lot of stress within your organisation as well. So I want to look at some strategies of how we’re actually going to fix this. Alignment, honestly, is a bit of an ongoing process, and it’s not a one-time fix effort. Like any good marketing strategy, and anything we say on this podcast in the past, there’s sadly no silver bullet to both your marketing strategy, your sales strategy, and also the alignment between both strategies and between both teams. It is going to take a bit of time.

It’s going to take some planning. It’s going to take some proper execution to actually get this right. But you can start by setting some unified objectives for both marketing and for sales. And one of the true things you can start with is data. You can’t always 100% trust a sales, a CEO, or a marketing person’s gut. Data is the true key. Data is going to remove that emotion. So suppose marketing is asking sales for some anecdotal lead quality information. Maybe they’re asking the sales team this question at 5pm on what’s been a really tough sales day. In that case, you’re going to get a really poor answer from the sales team.

But data, data is going to remove that emotion. Even if you have a look at your business and silo your business into your marketing side of your business, your sales side of your business, again, data is going to remove any of the misalignment between those two things. You need to have really clear marketing and sales goals. But combining this data, and allowing both sales and marketing team to see this data, will start in getting you some clear alignment. It’s going to start to show you how both parts of the business are actually essential to complement each other. So both the marketing teams and the sales team, or the marketing side of the business and the sales side of the business, you’ll start to see how they do really complement each other, and how different they can be, but how they also need to be so aligned as well.

Some data that you can focus on here is obviously a focus on overall revenue goals. It’s pretty obvious. But let’s go just a little bit deeper. What’s some of the other things that we can really be having a look at? Consider having a look at metrics like your customer acquisition cost. Think about that lifetime value as well. So not only is it costing us $25 or $150 to get this prospect, to get this lead, but then if we get this lead over the line, what is the lifetime value of that client? How long can that client be with us? How many upsells and upgrades is that client likely to spend and to use with our company? So what does that acquisition cost, and what is that lifetime value?

Also, I’d consider agreeing on some lead quality definitions as well, just to make sure that marketing is actually supporting sales effectively. So having a think about your demographic information, agreeing on some behavioural data that you want to focus on and look at for both teams, engagement levels as well. Here, I would also be thinking about your BANT criteria: your budget, your authority, your need, and your timeline criteria.

So let’s break that down. What budget should leads have allocated for your product and service? And this is going to help you get a true understanding about how you can market and find these leads. Who’s actually making the decision? What needs does that person have? And what’s their timeline? Are they desperate for a solution right now? Is it something that’s going to be like a long burn over time? Identify all of that criteria and, 100%, I believe that you will be ahead of the game. Because all of that criteria, and we’ll go through this in a little bit more detail as well, but all of that criteria, especially with that BANT criteria, if we can get alignment on that, gives the marketing team so much more information to actually help build your funnels and your campaigns, and actually build a proper sales customer journey.

But by then agreeing and then analysing the data that we’ve just spoken about, and actually implementing a lead score system, what you’ll start to see is that both teams will actually be able to align on what constitutes, what is a high-quality lead. And this is going to ensure that marketing can actually support sales goals more effectively. And it’s going to remove, like I say, that gut feeling about “that lead quality just hasn’t been as high”. What data is telling you that the lead quality is not the best at the moment, and what changes we can have. So use that data to help remove the emotion.

But only then do I recommend that you then bring just a little bit of emotion back into play. So once the data is flowing, goals are set, you want to start to implement frequent, structured communication channels between both teams. Now, again, I’m going to preface: if you’re a smaller business, if you don’t have a marketing team and a sales team, you’re just treating it all in one, treat each silo, each division of your business, as if you would treat them as a separate team. So think about the sales process as a team and your marketing process as a team, and how you can encourage communication between both of those processes, as opposed to just communication between both of those teams.

So I would be sitting here encouraging the sales team to provide timely updates on how the customer personas are actually changing and how they’re adapting over time. The way that technology is moving at the moment, the way that people are using AI, the way that people are using Google search, the way that the customer acquisition journey is changing and how fast it’s changing, how people’s pain points are shifting, or how people are consuming content or communicating with sales teams. It’s changing so fast. And so what this means is that it’s so important that marketing and sales are talking about this often. There should be some really clear questions that the marketing team should be asking the sales team to help them better guide their campaigns and their overall marketing strategy.

Here’s some of the questions that I would be encouraging you, if you were in the marketing team, to be asking your sales team, or if you’re in the marketing process, asking your sales process, and kind of fact-checking yourself here. The first thing is: who are the most valuable customers that we have right now? Think about those people and think about what are their specific attributes, and what specific attributes are defining that ideal customer. When you think about them as a valuable customer, what are the specific attributes that actually define them as that valuable customer? Is it their industry? The size of their company? Is it the pain points that they’re facing? Is it something to do with their buying behaviour?

And this question right here, this is going to help marketing teams adjust their key personas. It’s going to help adjust the key persona in a way that we can identify what better platforms we should be using to find these people. What type of content is going to resonate with those people?

When is the best time to connect with our target personas? The sales team will have data about, they get better connect rates at certain times of the day on different days of the week. Are there specific days? Are there specific times that are working well? And this information, if you can provide this information back to your marketing team, this again is really important. It’s going to provide marketing teams with really clear data on when it’s best for them to try sending email marketing campaigns. It could be giving much better indication about when we should be trying to reach customers and spending more on our campaigns and on our budgets.

And not saying that we’re going to be, as a marketing team, then saying, well, look, if you’re getting good connect rates at 9am on a Thursday, we’re going to send out all our communications at that time. No, what we can be doing is we can be planning around that time, making sure that the marketing messaging is going out, getting those prospects ready so that they are ready to answer the phone and ready to make key decisions when the sales team are actually calling.

The next question you should be asking: what common objections are you hearing from your prospects? Marketing teams should be asking sales this often. We should be understanding and trying to help support sales more on hitting those objections first, before they get to actually bring that up to the table with the sales team. So if we can answer those questions as part of that customer journey and as part of that buying process, then they’re more likely not to ask those questions on those sales calls. And also, sales and marketing teams should be making sure they’re staying aligned on who the key decision makers are that they are talking to in that buying process, and aligning on what their roles and concerns are as well. And this goes back to that BANT criteria that I spoke about earlier. Making sure sales and marketing communicate and update that criteria as often as needed.

What content or resources are actually going to be most helpful within your sales process? I hear this a lot when we’re talking with businesses, and they’re like, the sales team are like, oh my God, if we could have this PDF thing that we could create and we could send that out, oh my God, that would just be an absolute game changer for us. The most simplest thing that you could create as a marketing team is probably what the sales team are looking for right now. And it’s only because you’re not talking to them that you don’t understand that it could be a tool that would really help them as their sales process. Are the sales team having conversations with this massive wish list of things that they wish that they could provide prospects in the buying process? But as a marketing team, you have no understanding, no awareness that they even have these issues. But as a marketing team, it could be a really simple thing to fix as well.

The other thing I’d be asking the sales team is: are there competitors that are coming up frequently in your conversations? Now, why do we need this information? Well, as a marketing team, we can then analyse those competitors. We can find out how they are pitching themselves, find out what our differences are, make sure that our campaigns and our content is accentuating our differences.

Also, ask your sales team: what is the typical sales cycle length? Are there any factors that tend to shorten or lengthen that sales cycle length as well? And again, that question there is going to help marketing teams with designing our content flows, designing out our marketing funnels. It’s going to help us accurately help customers along that buying process, alongside what the sales team is saying is that buying cycle and that buying process.

But honestly, to combat a lot of what we’re discussing here, I suggest that you need to hold regular joint meetings to discuss and ask those questions that we’ve just gone through there, discuss progress, discuss some of the challenges that sales team is facing, discuss some of the challenges that marketing is having with finding the correct prospects, and trying to work together.

Or you can also use a tool that we developed. Now, this tool allows sales teams to actually fill in the answers to all those key questions that we’ve just run through. It’s kind of like a bit of a mini survey. And it’s going to allow the sales team to then send that direct to the marketing team, which then allows the marketing team to combine those gut feelings, essentially, with the data that they have from their CRM or from their marketing analytics, to help create a better marketing and sales process overall. So using a tool like that, it’s going to take the gut feelings, combine it with data, and hopefully align the sales and marketing so much better as well.

And if you’re seeing massive changes with your customer personas, so if you’re doing an exercise like that and finding out what is changing in the sales process, and you’re seeing that there are massive customer persona changes, or, even better or worse, you haven’t yet developed out any customer personas, create unified customer personas together between both the sales and the marketing team. Try and create that together so that you can get a better understanding for both teams, instead of siloing each team off individually.

Include in these personas things like your demographic, your psychographic insights. Update these personas often as well. Update them based on real-world data. Use these personas to guide both your marketing strategies and your sales approaches as well. These personas are so key. We talk about this pretty much every podcast. If you don’t have a key persona in your business, stop, figure that out first, and then get back to marketing and sales.

We started working with businesses that have been key operators in their industries for years and who don’t actively revisit or create their key personas until we started working with them. And it’s a great process to go through, because they know intimately, these marketing teams or these business owners, they know intimately who their key customers are and what it is about them that they like. But they’re not actively putting it into a key persona, which then means that they’re not actively marketing for those people, or the sales process isn’t supporting those key clients and actually finding the people that you want to do business with at the end of the day.

So in B2B, sales and marketing and alignment is so essential for sustainable growth. And again, I’m going to say this applies to large teams, but also small organisations as well. If you don’t have a marketing and sales team, think about those as a marketing process and a sales process. How can you get alignment between both of those processes? Alignment is going to require consistent effort, going to require open communication, and lots of adaptability as well.

It’s going to require clear data merged with anecdotal gut information. But remember, don’t ever just rely on the gut information. Try and always put it alongside some CRM lead quality data. And honestly, the rewards and revenue growth and the efficiency and customer and team satisfaction is going to make it all so much more worthwhile for you as well. Your team is going to be so much happier. And for small organisations, without a clear sales and marketing team, you’re going to have just so much better alignment and so much better focus overall as well.

And look, at Done By Nine, this is what we enjoy doing. This is what we enjoy trying to work in with sales and marketing teams, running workshops to try and get alignment between teams and build up marketing and sales strategies. If you want some guidance of how to kick this off, please reach out to the team. You can find us on our website, donebynine.com. You can click the Start Here button, or, of course, you can go along to our website, listen to all of our past podcasts or read all of our past content and blogs. We like to share things as often as possible to help you in your journey of how to market your business and create more sales and more growth and more revenue over the long run as well.

Look, I hope you’ve been able to get some new information out of this podcast today. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast.