The Sales v Marketing referee

A very successful 3x founder told me his biggest problem is an inability in his team to look at the same numbers and come to the same conclusion.

“The VP of Sales is pulling her hair out that we have no leads other than those generated by an expensive outbound team. The VP of Marketing is yelling at Sales for not following up the huge number of leads they are providing. Why do I have to play mom [yes, he was American] to get them to play nice?”

In an age of shiny new questions and shiny new AI tools, this is a dull and tarnished question, but one that still won’t go away.

Why do smart people who work well together otherwise, who are genuinely invested in the same success get to such different places?

Part of it is human: if things are not working, it’s much easier to point a finger elsewhere. But the problem is allowing this structure in the first place.

Three questions to untangle this particular mess:

1️⃣ What is the definition of a lead passed from marketing to sales?

2️⃣ What is the SLA that sales have committed to follow-up a lead from marketing?

3️⃣ What is the feedback loop for marketing to find out the quality of the leads?

This founder was confident that these were absolutely clear across the organisation. But 30 seconds of conversation with his sales and marketing leaders made it clear they were not.

Fixing this was harder than it should be, but we got there. Clarity rained, we understood the shared problem.

The real fix came when we stopped looking at Marking and Sales as two separate functions and instead started looking at shared responsibilities. This company had several Marketing campaigns running and several Sales focused activities. You can probably guess the next sentence. They were NOT coordinated. They were doing different activities, to different focus segments and not supporting each other.

Doh doh doh. The minute anyone thought about it was blindingly obvious.

The solution: all campaigns for GTM were agreed by both Sales + Marketing leadership, even if they were largely the domain of one of these functions.

Every single campaign had a Marketing AND a Sales coordinator.

These two people held SHARED responsibility for ensuring that goals were clear, tasks were sensibly allocated, results were tracked and data gathered.

Campaign ideas started coming from all over the GTM organisation. Some of them were nonsense. Some of them were brilliant. Some of them seemed brilliant and still failed. But they did so efficiently and in a coordinated fashion.

Working together, the Power of One 😉