Smells Like
B2B Team Spirit

Sales and marketing ultimately have the same goal: to improve the bottom line for their organization. Why then does it often feel like they’re at odds with each other and not even playing the same game, let alone playing on the same team?

“The human challenge is greater than the technology challenge” when it comes to sales and marketing alignment, says Gary Skidmore, executive chairman of Aberdeen Group. “It’s a challenge for marketing to create leads that sales considers good, and a challenge for marketing to get sales to follow up on those ‘good’ leads.”

How to bridge the divide? Engaging all of the constituents early in the process is essential, Skidmore says. “Give the salespeople a voice in campaigns. That will break down a lot of the barriers. Take their feedback on prior experiences, so they feel more ownership of what is being created, and so they can’t say the marketing people made all the decisions.”

Michael Marino, director, marketing operations at Pitney Bowes, notes that one of his organization’s biggest challenges is alignment between what marketing expects and the goals set by sales. To help bring that in line, the Pitney Bowes sales and marketing operations teams work closely together.

“We’ve gotten more clear about sharing our plans for what audiences we’re targeting and how,” Marino says. “It has helped—sales is fantastic about being honest and giving us feedback about what will help them in one-on-one conversations [with prospects].”

As marketing uses that input to shape creative, it empowers the sales team. “They get to put their fingerprints on the marketing materials,” he says. “And if they believe in the content, they’ll support it.”

Creating Confidence

In Chief Marketer’s 2018 B2B Lead Gen Outlook report, “sales not following up on leads generated by marketing” was cited as the top challenge to sales and marketing integration, followed by marketing not generating quality leads, and sales and marketing not behaving like they have common goals. Integration overall is improving: 60 percent of respondents said their sales and marketing teams communicate effectively, up from 57 percent last year.

Companies need to focus more on quality than quantity when it comes to leads, Skidmore notes. “Bad leads are a barrier to integration—sellers lose confidence in the marketing people.”

Good salespeople are very independent and self motivated. “They take care of their own problems,” says Skidmore. “If they have confidence in the leads, they’ll follow up and sell. If they don’t, they’ll just look at them as a nuisance.”

Having the right technology in place to insure a timely response to those marketing qualified leads is crucial, he adds. If someone has attended a webinar or downloaded a whitepaper, sales should touch those leads in a matter of hours, not days. After all, if someone is considering your product or service, they’re also considering your competition’s offerings as well. “Leads spoil much quicker in today’s digital marketing world.”

Deploying Salesforce Marketing Cloud has helped the Pitney Bowes team see across its CRM application, and get a view into what messages the clients are receiving, as well as what they are opening and clicking. The team utilizes what they call “asset central” within Salesforce to catalog content and apply relevant analytics to help sales reps search and find something that will work for a particular client’s needs.

Determining sales qualified leads versus marketing qualified lead is an ongoing issue, he says. Insuring some level of BANT—Budget, Authority, Needs and Timeline—is part of the process. “We have a fair amount of folks that indicate they want to be contacted by a sales rep, but, it’s hard to guarantee quality,” says Marino.

An internal business development team of eight to 10 reps works diligently to figure out the nature of inquiries. “They’re out there kicking the tires,” he says. “Marketing has played a more influential role to help connect the dots and prequalify leads.”

Working Together

Marketing needs to think and act like a sales enabler, says Ajay Gupta, CEO at Stirista, noting that in every message there needs to be a proposition, pain point or opportunity that resonates with the buyer.

“The most common complaint is often the ‘leads are no good’ or ‘they’re not ready,’ where marketing has fallen short in qualifying leads and scoring them as sales-ready,” says Gupta. “Interest in the right type of content can very much be a buying indicator, while interest in another type is an indicator the prospect needs to be nurtured.”

From a cultural standpoint, sales and marketing teams need to be in alignment when it comes to common goals, cohesive and consistent messaging and accountability, noted Manohar Chapalamadugu, founder and CEO of AgileCRM, in a recent article for Chief Marketer. 

“Senior management should lead the way by clearly restructuring and re-defining the roles, responsibilities and expectations for each team,” he wrote. “There are a number of different ways to approach this, from standardizing regular communication protocols between marketing and sales to defining how each department specifically contributes to common business goals.”

A survey from demand gen company Televerde reported that the biggest challenges in getting sales and marketing to work well together included a lack of regular communication (34 percent) and differences in the way each department measures success (33 percent). The top three assets sales professionals said they want from marketing were industry events (50 percent), value proposition (46 percent) and customer case studies (42 percent).

“What we’ve found is that there are some simple, but key, steps to take that help ensure sales and marketing are on the same page,” says Ray Kemper, CMO at Televerde. “Things like adopting a common language by jointly defining an inquiry and a lead and agreeing on buyer personas and journeys are seemingly obvious steps that are often not put in place and can make a big difference.”

Skidmore notes that today large enterprises are often using account based marketing (ABM) to focus on the big opportunities internally and passing other accounts along to resellers, particularly in the technology space. “There’s an increased dependence on the reseller channel,” he says. [Manufacturers] are creating leads or assets that get passed along to resellers, and paying attention to making sure those leads are getting followed up on.”

Creating processes for implementing ABM is critical, from identifying accounts and the right individuals in those accounts, to insuring rapid response when leads need to be followed up.

Most sales and marketing professionals (78 percent) are collecting data to score accounts based on fit, propensity or readiness to buy, according to a recent survey by marketing and sales intelligence firm DiscoverOrg. The survey found that job title, department budget and job function were the most commonly predictive fit criteria. Surprisingly, 40 percent of respondents said they don’t use or don’t know their fit criteria.

Sales teams tend to value hiring and personnel signals more than marketers for qualifying leads, according to the survey. This is likely due to the close relationships B2B sales professionals often have with individuals at customer organizations. After all, when a contact leaves their job for a new organization, the sales rep has to then create a connection with the new hire. On the flip side, a new executive means an opportunity to create a relationship with the new leader.

More technology isn’t necessarily the answer to making sure this happens, Skidmore says. “I think most marketers are platformed beyond their capacity to take advantage of the [technology] they already have.”

Rather, it may make sense to increase spending with consultants to better use what they already have. “Customers buy platforms with high expectations, and then reality sets in,” he says. “Having the bandwidth to [really capitalize] on the investment is hard.”

Beth Negus Viveiros is the managing editor of Chief Marketer. Follow her on Twitter at @CMBethNegus.