The Secret Causes of the Marketing & Sales Misalignment.

In the business-to-business space to one of the hottest topics is aligning Marketing and Sales. I love this topic because I laugh at the proposed solutions and the lack of understanding of the cause of the problem.

 Let’s first outline the problem before we can even consider some solutions. First Marketing and Sales are not just misaligned then are usually working against each other. The cause of the conflict is not personal or even skills but rather how they are incentivized and rewarded. Marketing is typically judged on the quantity of leads that they provide to the Sales team. Now this would seem logical and obvious but in it resided the problem. Anytime you focus on quantity you are incentivized to reduce quality. For example if you are paid to do push ups how much do you care about the quality of each push up? No Much!

 So Marketing has a conflict of interest with Sales. Sales is measured on only one outcome, Revenue!, Revenue is a quantifiable goal i.e. a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, sure some deals are more valuable long term but money is money.  But we all know that a lead is not a lead. This quality issue has another toxic side effect in that low quality leads require the same amount of Sales CRM time as high quality leads. So the more low quality leads the LESS revenue is generated. This side effect makes Marketing look good and Sales look bad.

How many of us have spent end-less hours and in sales meetings complaining about the quality of leads? Of course Marketing’s response is that you did not follow-up on 20% of the leads that you were provided. Sales’s quickly responds that they were leads from college students, competitors, unemployed consultants and minimum security prisoners. Hardly worth the time it takes to contact and account for in the CRM.

The second problem is Organizational, Sales and Marketing typically report to a CEO or President. Why is this a problem? Well who is Marketing’s customer? Ahhhh Sales? Yah that is right. So Marketing is politically motivated to do what the CEO wants over what Sales wants or needs. This would seem obvious but it alludes 99% of the CEO’s. If the CEO understands Marketing and Sales well this may not be a big deal but what is the likelihood that a CEO would have that broad of experience? This organizational challenge pins the two departments against each other. When things are going well this is not an issue but rarely to do things go well... When revenue is missed the CEO looks to the Sales group because they are responsible for revenue. Of course it is not JUST Sales’s fault but they need to explain why they miss the goal. What is always top on the list? You got it, quality of leads. Marketing knows that this is coming and they campaign hard to justify their contribution.

In all my client engagements the VP of Marketing is working get the VP of Sales replaced and vis versa. Usually the VP of Marketing wins simply because the VP of Sales is out of the office trying to close deals and the VP of Marketing has the CEO’s ear. 

Like most things in life this alignment problem is easier to identify and diagnose then it is to solve. The reason it is so hard to solve is because the world of B2B marketing and Sales has changed so dramatically in the past few years.

 In future posts I will share what solutions I have seen work and ones that I have seen fail.

If you listen to PodCasts, check out mine “The Brutal Truth about Sales & Selling”.

Please comment with what solutions you have seen to the Sales and Marketing alignment problem.

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I welcome LinkedIn connections and thanks for reading this post,

Brian