Solving conflict between sales and marketing

Quotes

• “We have been in those QBRs (Quarterly Business Review) where a CEO says, ‘sales aren’t going to what we want, numbers aren’t looking good.’ At some point marketing will point to sales and say, ‘hey, I’m delivering good leads here so if they can’t close, that is a sales problem.’ Sales leadership will come back with and say, our pipeline is not where I want it to be. So apparently we needto get more leads. Neither of those perspectives is inherently wrong.” -Aaron“All marketers are aware of the limitations of lead scoring because every business, every TAM, every lead stream is different. There is no perfect fit that works across everything. It’s always a bit contentious.” -Aaron“While marketers continue to build leads volume across channels and get more sophisticated each year with strategy, technology, content, and data, what we have seen in the sales side, is that the sales development role and teams are exploding.” -Aaron“15 years ago, you would not find a lot of sales development roles, it was considered something an Account Executive would do. Now we see companies with hundreds of sales development reps in different business units.” -Aaron“It’s a reflection of how difficult it’s been to take these hundreds and thousands of leads, some new, some older, some showing signs of life and try to actually convert them to qualified leading for the Account Executive.” -Aaron “For marketers, despite how many leads they put at the top of the funnel, what actually comes at the bottom or even what actually goes in the pipeline is really limited and constrained by that sales development resource and it can reflect negatively on marketerswho are doing a great job, they just don’t control all those human assets and team.” -Aaron“If there’s a team that has emerged recently, it parallels the big push of Account-Based Marketing solution. Part of the excitement around this is, related to a theme around lead production which is that the volume doesn’t matter these days as much as in market timing and readiness.” -Aaron“In general the idea is just start to think of the entire funnel together as the revenue funnel and try to connect the sales and marketing area of it which brings me to a couple of themes.” -Aaron“Kronologic is laser-focused on getting the lead into thecalendar. We do it in 60 seconds or less. We certainly at least get the calendar invitation out to them with a real-time offering from one of your folks in their calendar within 60 seconds.” -Aaron“The other big theme I see is, this intersection between marketing and sales within the revenue funnel which is a bit of a black box. What I mean is, marketers, say, ‘I know I sent 400 leads from this channel this month.’ and sales go, ‘I know that we had 78 meetings. So what happened to the other 322 leads? Since marketing doesn’t necessarily own that and since sales don’t own that piece, that conversion, oftentimes nobody is really tracking that conversion rate and just take it as it is.” -Aaron“We’ve heard that the CMO role is going away and they are becoming CRO. This is a big component in that. Someone needs to own the entire life cycle from prospect to lead to customer and that it is both sales and marketing and having someone that is responsible for it makes a lot of sense.” -Ben