Sales is Dead......Wait, I thought Marketing Was Dead.......Something Must be Dead.......

I am sure you are excited, another article/post that makes a bold blanket statement about something "being dead", that will reference a couple of industry points (maybe something from Gartner or Sirius Decisions) and then like the hero saving the day finish strong by connected by product and services to this growing industry trend. Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't intend to kill anything in this article. Instead of killing off things, what we should be focused on is building things, specifically a bridge between our sales and marketing organizations. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, there is no magic software you can buy or tactic you can implement. There is no is no B2B marketing "easy button". The key to the promised land of ROI rests solely in the alignment of your marketing and sales organization. Unfortunately, in the B2B space this is where the biggest gap still sits.

• Only 27% of marketing generated leads get followed up on by sales
• 80% of Sales require five or more follow ups to get a meeting, yet 44% of sales reps give up after one follow up

As general we spend far too much time talking about tactics and vendors and performance reports, and not enough time focused on what has the biggest impact on the performance of demand marketing programs - the sales organization following up on the leads. One of our industries biggest trends is "ABM", but I'm willing to bet if you asked 10 marketers what their ABM strategy is, you'd get 10 different answers. The reason account based marketing has seen some success is not due to the tactical approach of focusing on specific clients with marketing. The success is being driven by the bridge ABM has built between the sales and marketing organization, allowing for collaboration to achieve a common goal, driving customer growth and revenue for their organization.

So, how can your company further align sales and marketing to drive results.

Sales and Marketing Should Have a Single Leader - (Yes, I know - this point coming from someone with one of those new fancy "CRO" titles comes off as a bit too "perfect"). Title aside, sales and marketing organizations need as single leader. This leader's sole responsibility is not generating revenue (that's a byproduct) but building and managing the customer journey for your prospects/accounts. The "Chief Customer Journey Officer" (CCJO) must build an organization that believes in and executes with consistency every aspect of the buying process from first engagement, to contract signature.

Stop Making Exceptions/Excuses for Sales - Yes, I said it . Behind 90% of poor performing organizations sit poor sales teams (usually run by a poor sales leaders). Yet for some reason, when things aren't going well, the first things most organizations look to fix is marketing?

• "The Lead quality was bad, We need more "Sales Ready" opportunities"
• "Marketing hasn't generated enough leads"

Sound familiar? It's as if some sales leaders believe "ready to buy" leads can be purchased at the corner store in bulk? In order to fix the problem, we need to stop allowing our sales organizations to pass the buck of poor performance onto the marketing and support teams that help them drive revenue. It's NEVER a lead problem, and ALWAYS a sales problem. If your sales leader doesn't agree, find a new sales leader

Setting the right goals - Sounds easy enough right - how about we just give the marketing team a revenue goal and call it a day, that will do the trick right? Unfortunately no, and may in fact have an adverse effect on your teams performance. Goals should not be focused on the end result (revenue), but in consistently fueling the customer journey you are trying to achieve.

• Marketing's goals must focus on what marketing does best - generating leads that meet an agreed upon target audience.
• Sales goals must focus on what sales does worst - clear and specific guidelines in how these leads are worked. (cadences, templates, scripts).
• Sales and marketing leaders must come to a 100% agreement on goals for both organizations

Too often, we set goals that focus too heavily on the end result and trust in our teams to "make it happen". This often leads to inconsistency and problems with scale. Our goals must clearly align with pushing our prospects through the customer buyer journey we have created. In order to achieve our goals, we need to focus on rewarding execution of the process.

Please, I beg of you - stop KILLING marketing and sales tactics in an effort to find the easy button to revenue growth. Instead, lets continue to build and fortify the bridge between our sales and marketing organizations, Behind every high growth company, sits a sales and marketing team that are perfectly in alignment with their desired customer journey. Sales is an extension of marketing, as much as marketing is an extension of sales. Stop focusing so much on tactics, and focus on building a bullet proof process to identify your target buyer, and push that target buyer to adopting your products/services.