Exploring Sales and Marketing Misalignment

Marketing teams around the world are busier than ever, scrambling to create digital content to be used for social or email campaigns, sponsored ads, and so on. Many marketing departments have gone through a radical resource change lately as they've pushed out the traditional brochure-building marketers and brought in more digital expertise. So imagine to their surprise, after all this hard work, the sales professionals at their organization all but ignoring their newly produced digital content. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, “Up to 65% of your marketing team's digital content never makes its way into the customer's hands.” ¹ SiriusDecisions expands on that statistic to say that in an average enterprise organization that wastage can be valued at $17,400,000. Let's put that into context within your organization. Your digital marketing team will spend about five hours of their eight-hour day in activities that do nothing more than spin its wheels! If you were to ask digital content marketers to use one word to describe how they feel about their place within the organization, they'd say “underappreciated.”

If you flip the viewpoint to the sales professionals, they look at the problem with much more cynicism and little remorse for the marketing team. If fact, a sales team looks at its own personal daily activity in binary, black-and-white, results-based evaluation: “Does this create sales?” So the sales team's cynicism toward marketing is due to a lack of understanding of how marketing isn't kept to a similar high standard of accountability. Members of your sales team are most likely saying to themselves “I'm not receiving enough leads from market to make my quota!” These sales professionals don't care about a marketer's activity levels unless they can be quantified to influence a sales professional's results. Your sales team can't figure out why it lives under the constant pressure of making sales quota and living by a number when marketing seems to be void of this same level of accountability. Accountability—could this be the word that has sales and marketing frustrated at each other?

Does this Problem Start with Blind Spots?

Marketing has begun leveraging technology to mechanize content distribution and engagement. Many marketing teams have invested heavily into employee advocacy systems (which we explore in greater detail in Chapter 17) only to see sales professionals engagement flatline or decline after launch. Why is this? Marketers will ask themselves in frustration, “Why can't I get my sales team to see the value of content?”

Simply put, sales professionals have no idea that there is a direct or even indirect correlation (known as attribution or influence) among digital content shared with buyers, reaching buyers' hands, and increasing inbound leads. Beyond inbound leads, that same confusion also reaches the top of the sales funnel because sales professionals can't see how content will increase their probability of winning a deal. Of course, sales doesn't know this. Salespeople are masters at finding the path of least resistance, and only do activities with a what's-in-it-for-me attitude. No matter how you may have tried to explain the conversion funnel to the sales team, it hasn't sunk in! If it had sunk in, you would have sales professionals flocking to share digital content with their buyers. You, as a marketer, know this correlation to be true, and you're utterly perplexed that your sales team just doesn't see it. Your sales team will give you golden sales excuses such as “I don't have time.” This is sales code for “I don't see value!”

This misalignment on value is actually a data-driven problem. This misalignment is because you have blind spots in the data you share between your departments. These blind spots are perpetuated because sales has an opaque vantage into:

1. “What are you doing back there? Your production schedule, which is supposed to help serve myself and my buyers, is doing very little to help me make quota.”
2. “Are my buyers really reading my content? How often and in what order? Just before or after I have a meeting with them?”

Expanding into the second list item, a buyer is leaving digital fingerprints on your website and on multiple digital assets. This pattern of digital fingerprints is called their content consumption story. The following is an example of how an average sales organization did not leverage information about their buyers' content consumption story.

An inbound lead is created, and the marketing team, in partnership with a sales development representative (SDR), will place a call to that lead. A strong SDR would leverage some contextual information about that buyer's digital history, perhaps the ebook he or she downloaded, to become a lead. The SDR has a phone conversation with the lead, and books a discovery call with the prospective buyer that will include a senior sales executive. From the moment that discovery call was booked, in nearly every sales organization I've ever seen, the digital fingerprints of that buyer are not presented to the senior sales executive. Unfortunately, this sales cycle could be 90, 180, or 365 days long, yet the senior sales executive will not have real-time information of that lead's digital fingerprints. It's no wonder sales professionals have little faith in digital content. In their minds, content does little more than create a random set of inbound leads. The sales organization has never been given the intelligence on the indirect influence that digital content is having in shaping a buyer's journey for months and months!

How Do KPI Measurements Play with Misalignment?

Answer these questions aloud:

1. How are quota-carrying sales professionals measured at the end of a year?
2. The percentage of their quota obtained.

The answer is so simple for sales. It's one number, in a percentage. Binary accountability.

Sales professionals are paid against that number, rewarded against that number, given accolades such as President's Club trips against that number, and of course, fired against that number. One number to rule them all. As a sales professional, it's the only thing I care about!

But most marketing departments measure themselves against leads, marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, sales-accepted leads…call it what you'd like. It's a solid leading indicator, but it's not sales bookings. Now, before you blow a gasket and give me the excuse that marketing leaders can't control the closing of a sale, I want you to check that impulse at the door. That impulse is the mindset of an individual, not an ecosystem. I said this at the beginning of the book, synergy is defined as the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Marketing leaders need to recognize that they're equal contributors, and equally accountable, to sales success. You are all on Team Revenue. Your team will behave based on how it is measured. If you continue to give the team a lagging indicator goal like lead volume, that dictates the behavior you will see. This kind of myopic outlook accounts for only a portion of the ecosystem.

How Do We Change Our Mindset?

Naturally, throughout this process, we are going to extract objective evidence, plot trends, and create a prescription to completely align marketing to sales quota attainment. But fundamentally, there are a few simple changes I'd like you to make first:

1. Drop the word content from your vocabulary.

   Content sounds like you produce widgets, bo-bobs, things, while insights are a form of intellectual property. You need to inherently believe that the insights your team builds are so valuable that you could charge customers for the knowledge. Your company may have 5, 10, 20 years of market experience. This wisdom is what your customers are buying, not just your solution. Change the way your entire organization talks about insights, and treat these assets like you would a government-registered patent to intellectual property.

2. I'm going to Moneyball our digital marketing.

   Marketing is becoming a numbers game just like sales. Great marketing teams are objectively looking at their production capabilities (like an ad agency would) and the results that is having on sales. Like Moneyball did with baseball, Team Revenue should focus on the micro-elements of a process by establishing a baseline and making incremental improvements to it. If you take this scientific approach to your marketing team, you'll realize you can control everything like a production line of an automobile. You're going to crush your competition when you can identify a few elements within your marketing process that are yielding the highest return, then accelerate that process faster than anyone in your industry. This is only possible when you measure your production throughput and become objective about your resource capacity at a very granular level.

3. I'll make the first move to extend the olive branch.

   Yes, as a marketing leader you're a copilot on Team Revenue. Yes, this is a joint exercise. But guess what? I've trained way too many companies to know that sales leaders don't think they need marketing as much as they do. It's you, the marketing leader, who is going to prove objectively that your team is directly and indirectly fueling sales growth. Sales and marketing alignment in world-class organizations is also orchestrated by sales Enablement and sales operations, but the first move to making this happen, I recommend, comes from you.