In Driving Greater Sales Marketing Alignment – Marketing POV, we covered the solution to the misalignment problem from the POV of Marketing.
In this blog post, we will see some ways by which Sales can drive greater alignment with Marketing.
To recap, the following are the key areas of misalignment between sales and marketing from Sales POV:
- Marketing wastes our time with leads that will never buy
- Marketing is drunk on the Kool-Aid of industry megatrends (read Gartner / Forrester reports) whereas our prospects are least bothered about anything beyond their company and industry
- Marketing shoots off high level ideas for generating additional business from existing customers without adapting them to individual situations
- Whenever Marketing fixes sales meetings, prospects have unrealistic expectations about our company and products.
Driving Alignment – Sales POV
Let’s see what sales can do to eliminate these areas of misalignment.
Leads That Never Buy
Back in the day, Marketing would generate “sales ready” leads and hand them over the Sales to convert them to deals. Sales would often complain that the leads fed by Marketing were not sales-ready.
Those days are gone. Sales should stop having such complaints now.
In the current Buyer 2.0 era, prospects create a longlist of 8-10 suppliers based on online research, analyst reports, interactions with existing users, and so on. They crunch the data and create a shortlist of 3-5 vendors without calling sales. By the time they’re ready to buy, they reach out to only the shortlisted vendors.
As a result, a sales-ready lead is a potential deal for your competitor, not you. Concepts like BANT are dead as a dodo in the present day and age. More at Sales Will Hasten Its Demise By Sitting On The BANT High Horse.
To win in today’s world, Sales needs to find ways to engage with prospects earlier in the purchase cycle without being called by the prospect. Marketing should enable Sales in this pursuit.
As soon as Sales stops expecting sales-ready leads from Marketing, this misalignment will fade away.
On a side note, this has led to a gradual morphing of Marketing’s role from generation of sales-ready leads to insight marketing.
Thought Leadership Marketing: What you *can* gain in future by doing things differently from present.
Insight Marketing: What you *are* losing today by doing things in the present way.
It has also added solutioning to the Sales job. Sales reps who can step up the plate to handle their expanded role won’t have to worry about doomsday predictions about the loss of millions B2B sales jobs, as described in our blog post entitled What Happens Before A Prospect Contacts Sales?.
Gartner / Forrester Kool-Aid
When your sales rep meets a Qualified Lead / Appointment generated by Marketing, most prospects are solely interested in what you can do for their company in their specific context. Content that dwells too much on industry megatrends at 30000 feet can derail a sales meeting.
Marketing should recognize this behavior pattern and go easy on analyst speak in product guide, capability document, and other Middle of Funnel (MOFU) content.
Budget permitting, we encourage development of ASPO for these sales meetings. An Account Specific Point Offering is a very powerful type of content for MOFU that’s customized for the specific prospect that Sales is meeting. See Creating ASPO To Bolster Cold Call Success Rates for more details.
Having said that, if your products / services are featured in Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave, it elevates your company’s appeal at Top of Funnel (TOFU) to the next level. Accordingly, Sales would do well to appreciate that Marketing needs to be engaged with the Gartners and the Forresters of the world and use their inputs for TOFU content.
Unrealistic Expectations
Overselling is obviously wrong and Marketing should totally eschew it.
But not aspirational selling. The practice comes into the picture when there are some features supported by your product that are implemented at some customers but not at others.
Many sales reps are wary of speaking about these features altogether. Their over-conserative approach will seriously hamper your sales, especially in crowded markets. If they can’t abandon it, you need to abandon them.
Some features may not be implemented due to poor data quality, change management challenges, and other site-specific issues. You may want to have your sales reps trained to talk about them in a nuanced style. See Aspirational Selling Is Not Overselling for more details.
Sales Marketing Misalignment has been around for a long time. I’m under no illusion that the problem will disappear any time soon.
But I do fondly hope that my two part blog post will move the needle towards finding a solution in the forseeable future.
On a related note, credit sharing between sales and marketing is the elephant in the solution room. That merits a separate post on its own. Watch this space.