If your sales and marketing
teams are still playing tug of war, this is the episode for you.
We’re diving in how to fix misalignment, in this episode
of Closing Time.
Welcome to Closing Time, the show for go to market leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of marketing for Unbounce, Insightly and LeadsRx.
Today I’m joined by Jeff Davis.
He is the author of a book called Create Togetherness.
Jeff, welcome to the show.
Val, thank you for having me.
So you have quite an impressive career,. Jeff, ranging from sales
as an individual contributor, business development, marketing leadership
at both early stage startups and some fortune 100 companies.
How has this experience led you to have passion for marketing and sales alignment?
Yeah, Val will simply. I have lived it.
And so, you know, this has happened and become more of a thing.
But back in my day, you really either stayed in sales
or you stayed in marketing.
And so I made the transitions early
part of my career in field sales, carrying the bag, so to say.
And then was really, inspired to transition the marketing
a lot of a lot of which because I felt like marketing
didn’t understand what we salespeople needed in the field.
And I felt like I had a unique perspective to bring to the marketing team.
And, and I always joke and say,. I wanted to, to advocate for
salespeople within, within the ivory tower, so to say.
And so I went back to get my MBA and transformed myself into a marketer.
And what I found is in every organization. I worked in,
whether it be fortune 500 or early stage start ups.
We, I saw the same thing repeatedly over and over again.
And what that was is that sales and marketing did not
fully appreciate the value that they brought each other.
They did not understand the power of the relationship of
when they are unified, how much more they could achieve.
And so that’s really what inspired me to say, like,
there’s got to be a different way to do this.
And and I’ve just always been passionate about it.
And I think because I made that transition from sales and marketing,
I just had this a-ha moment of like, there is so much to unlock here.
If you do it right.
And so that is why I have focused majority of my career in my time
and speaking and working with companies, focusing on how they can transform
the revenue engine
to align sales and marketing and really fully unlock the revenue potential.
I love that perspective.
I mean, clearly just with the range of types of companies
you’ve worked for and types of roles you’ve had, you’ve definitely seen it all.
So what are some telltale signs that, hey, there’s an alignment issue
between sales and marketing going on in this company?
Yeah, this reminds me of a time.
So I was doing a keynote, for TMSA, which is the Transportation
Marketing and Sales Association.
And I was, talking about and kind of was sitting around the partnerships
and how these unlikely partnerships, like Steve Wozniak and Steve
Jobs come together and create something really special.
And so I talked about this theme around sales and marketing,
especially their leadership having a dysfunctional relationship.
And one of the leaders came up to me afterwards.
He was the sales leader, sales executive, had been in sales all his life.
And he’s like,
you really made me think differently about the relationship I had with marketing,
because me and the marketing director had a good personal relationship.
They got along, they were cordial with each other,
but he had never thought about the fact
that they did not have an effective. Professional relationship in meaning.
He was like,. I never knew what to ask them to do.
I never knew what to expect.
I never knew how to sit down
and have a conversation to say like, this is what I need from your team.
And so, in fact, what happened was he just focused on coaching his team
to not rely on marketing and not out of malice, but more so
he did not want them to rely
on something that he didn’t know was going to provide value to this team.
And so I think it’s important to, to identify that,
like sometimes you just don’t know what you what, you know.
But when you have that dysfunctional relationship, it is part, part and parcel
for a misalignment between sales and marketing.
Some of the other things we see play out is you have a disconnected
customer experience, and we know that is detrimental to buyers buying.
You know, one great example of that is, you know, buyers repeat what
they have shared with you from that, that handoff between like the BDR, the AE,
which is very frustrating.
And you have a lot of people follow the funnel
because they’re like, I’m repeating the same thing at every handoff.
Do you even know you know who I am or what I’m trying to achieve?
You’re not really providing value.
And then you also see this.
And I’ve run into this myself where marketing and sales don’t agree on ICP.
And so you have, you know, the sales force going rogue.
It feels like they’re going rogue,
because what salespeople will do with sales
people need to do in order to close the sale,
and if they find an ICP is not providing you value or doesn’t
match the reality, they will go find the business.
And so that is not.. And we know this, right?
That’s not the optimal way to operate.
But that’s another sign that like if we are talking
a very different language and looking at the very different people
that we need to step back, recalibrate, because there’s definitely misalignment
between the two teams.
I think all those signs are super valid.
But I do like
the way you started with leadership, because it really does start at the top.
And and if the leader, marketing leader and sales leader lack alignment,
I don’t care
if everything else is falling in line, it’s just not going to be successful.
So really good point. There. Yeah. 100%.
So, you’ve identified in your in your work
five big ideas based on your experience
that can help bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
I’d like to go through them one by one.
Let’s see how many we can get through, because there’s a lot of good meat here.
All right. So, we’ll start with the top.
Misalignment as a business design flaw.
You say that most companies are structured to discourage collaboration.
Let’s unpack that.
Yeah.
So early in my work and in thinking about this problem,
and so for me, this is many, many years ago, I literally started blogging.
I was frustrated.
I was working at a organization where I was brought in to really kind
of reimagine marketing, and the CEO was, didn’t really believe in marketing.
So a lot of convincing going to that, and it was a whole
that the whole nother podcast on the show, but we neither here nor there.
I really thought it was the people problem.
And I think historically a lot of us
are saying, well, just so the marketing got along
and they were forced to collaborate and put it in a room.
It’ll all like you know, magically work out.
And I would say early in this work,. I believe that.
I believe that like once you once you showed them
the value that their counterpart would bring.
I saw that leadership would get it, and then they would kind of, like,
magically come together.
There was some early, early research,. I believe, from Forester.
That show kind of like this list of,
of, all the things that marketing, provide sales and sales
provided marketing and then kind of closing that gap would alleviate that.
But what I found over the years, that is not the case.
And so I really did some, some digging into thinking about like,
why does this seem to be a systematic issue
that’s never fully resolved in most organizations?
You have organizations that have made great strides.
In, in, in the, the, the previous years, you have some
that have had initiatives that have not really sustained,
and you’ve had some organizations that continue to struggle with it.
And so what I identified as I really started to kind of
unpack this work and think about my past experience, is talking to executives
and really deep dive in research is that, it is a design issue.
It is a work design issue and that we historically, sales and marketing
have grown up in a way, in the organization.
And I won’t go into like kind of the history of how, you know,
I must admit, this marketing was wrote well, marketing was born
out of sales, which always makes, ruffles peoples’ feathers.
But that’s the reality of things.
And then over time, as marketing started to get closer and closer to the C-suite,
you know, involved in pricing, involved in more mass marketing campaigns
post industrial revolution, they started to kind of drift away.
Marketing became more strategic and closer to the C-suite,
and then sales were still kind of field based.
And so the way they looked at the business was different.
And what most organizations have done is they’ve optimized
vertically for the function, but they have not optimized horizontally.
And so what you’re doing is
you create incentives for people to optimize for their function
and really focus on, you know, meeting the goals
of their scorecards, but not thinking holistically about the business.
So this is where you see,
you can have a sales and marketing team hitting their goals,
but we still miss our revenue targets because of a multitude of things.
Right.
But the main being, they are folks are focused on their function
because that’s where the paycheck comes from.
And we many times don’t have interdependent targets.
And so they’re not directly connected to revenue.
And so all of that creates this kind of soup where
people are just focused on their own thing.
And we are wondering why, like it’s not translating at the top.
And that’s why.
And so that again goes back to that’s not a people issue.
That’s a way in which we are designing the system.
And it has worked for decades.
But as we especially move into this more digital age
and the stakes are higher for the buyer, they’re more digitally savvy.
They have access to information, unlimited information, don’t, let alone
introducing AI.
That just doesn’t work anymore.
And so until we address the actual system design,
you will never fully align sales
and marketing because it’s more than a people issue.
And so that’s why I say I as you unpack all of that,
you start to look at it differently.
It’s like we’ve got to put these people in the right environment.
So all our hard work actually translates to the results we want to consistently.
I love that you pointed out something that individual contributors
can have goals and can meet their goals, and then they can see that overall revenue
isn’t where we want to be, or that bookings aren’t where we want them to be.
And it can create dissonance within each individual contributor.
Each individual employee like, hey, I’m doing what I’m being asked to do.
I’m hitting the metrics that I have that have been set out for me.
And yet, and my colleagues are and yet the business isn’t moving
where we want to go.
It can be really frustrating.
100% 100.
And then also for starting for leadership
because, somebody’s got to answer for this.
We’re not hitting our revenue goals.
But it’s like hard to you
know, when you start with finger pointing and you know how this all goes.
So it’s frustrating for everybody.
And that’s again goes back to
why I, I strongly believe it’s a system issue, not a people issue.
Let me ask you, we have a couple of departments
that or teams that I think can assist with that misalignment issue.
And I’m probably not using the right words here, but,
you know, here at Unbounce,
we have a wonderful sales enablement function that can bridge the gap
between marketing campaigns and sales, putting them into action for really strong
rev ops team that can ensure all of the tooling is aligned.
And that and everything is is operating at a good pace and
and everything is being delivered where it’s supposed to.
Are, are roles like that, something
that maybe helps with the business design flaw.
Or are you saying it’s something it’s something bigger than that.
I think it absolutely helps.
But I would say it’s something that’s larger than that.
I think those are roles that get us that create,
a better intersection between teams.
But when you when I look at it at the macro level,
we really have to go in
and then we’ll probably get this a little bit late in our conversation.
It really all starts with the culture.
And so I think sometimes we what we try to do is that we
overindex on, the structure of the organization
aka like adding new roles, which I think, again, have value
and trying to lead us around the,
you know, the the strategy too soon.
And those things to me are what is supported by the upfront work,
which is around culture and making sure that we have
a communication rhythm that allows us to stay connected,
which I believe, like, you know, some of those sales functions
help with that, really developing an end to end process
so that we clearly understand we have a co-created buyers’ journey,
which I can’t tell you how many organizations
I’ve talked to where sales has no idea what the buyer’s journey is,
which makes me literally want to jump out of my skin, partly because I’m a marketer
and then, like, I came from sales, I’m just like, there’s total disconnect there.
And then making sure that we have a tech stack that is optimized,
a core revenue stack that supports and actually operationalize that.
And so I think, again, those roles add value.
But if we haven’t laid a strong foundation in order to be able to allow people
to be in the right environment, then they don’t fully get optimize.
that’s great. Jeff,
I do think those roles are important, but I do see it a bigger picture.
Let’s move on to the next big idea.
You’ve identified as being a root of a problem
is, and you’ve coined it, the misalignment tax.
What is the cost of staying misaligned?
And how do leaders quantify it?
one is a tough one.
And I think it is.
It is caused a lot of angst for sales and marketing leaders.
They want to get the support from senior leadership on, you know,
taking on this kind of effort.
It would be easy for me to come in and be like, oh, it’s $23 million.
That’s how much sales and marketing costs.
If you are, they’re misaligned in the reality.
That is, it is going to be different.
You know, throughout every organization, whether you’re an early stage startup,
mid-market, or an or enterprise now, Marketo and resources, some,
some research, several years ago where they estimated about 10% of revenue
loss can be attributed to misalignment between sales and marketing.
I think that’s a great starting point because a little bit more real,
there was in past days, you know, a number around like 11, 1 billion or something,
which, you know, never really was never really sat well with me.
And I’m not saying it was incredible.
It was it was hard for people to really wrap their heads around.
So I think the 10% of revenue was a little bit of an easier metric
to to start with.
But I think beyond that, you know, it really comes down to
you having to figure out what that is with for your organization,
both the quantitative cost as well as the qualitative costs.
And so that’s kind of how. I think about it.
And so on the quantitative side of things, you know, I look at things like low
quality pipeline.
So when we are misaligned going back to ICP, what does marketing do there.
Incentivize to bump or
push a bunch of leads into the pipeline, which may or may not be the right targets?
Sales either looks at it and says like, these are garbage.
This is not a fit.
And or there’s a there’s a delay in us actually working obsolete
because there’s not trust between the end two and skills.
Right. So that is a cost.
Stalled deals again, we don’t have,
definitions that are clear when handoffs are happening.
All of these things contribute to that cost.
And then also to the
the broken customer experience, which you talked about earlier, is that
that has become more important than price and product.
And developing a cohesive, seamless experience is people will opt out.
Most organizations have direct competitors.
And even if you don’t, I think, you know, in this day and age, You will.
Yeah, you will and people don’t want a terrible experience.
And it always I talked to B2B, you know revenue leaders and I said it’s
funny to me how we have all these great, amazing experiences outside of work in B2C
land, right?
Netflix, Amazon, Zappos, like these easy to navigate experiences where, you know,
and I and I’ll call myself out on this when we had to stop
hitting, you know, buy on
Amazon because like, you know, you it’s so easy.
You just start buying stuff and you’re like, I don’t remember buying this.
And so one of the things we’ve done is to stop and say,
we’re going to recalibrate, wait till Sunday, and if we still need it,
then we purchase it to kind of alleviate that.
But my point is it’s easy.
And so we come to these B2B experiences and we make it complicated and cumbersome
and hard
and not thinking that like our expectations outside of work
don’t bleed inside of work.
And so that’s absolutely a cost that we should think about.
Also to
the misalignment especially.
And we may get into this too, when you’re looking at like dashboards
and arguing over the number marketing says one thing sales to something else,
who knows the truth that delays us being able to act quickly
and take advantage of strategic opportunities.
And then, you know,
look at the qualitative side, morale, trust between departments.
And then sometimes if it’s really, really dire, you’ll have top talent.
I’ll just that will just leave because they’re frustrated
with not having a clear way to be set up for success and execute.
So I think it comes down to looking at both quantitative and qualitative
cost of alignment, that tack, so to say, and then working
with your cross-functional leadership team to say,
how do we estimate what this actually looks like for us?
And then that’s when you start to build the business case
for leadership to say, like, now there’s some hard metric behind this
that we can give you some ranges
and really start to get to a number that makes sense for your business.
I love that you have quantitative and qualitative measurements there
because yes everybody can relate to 10% of revenue.
But we’re in the midst of a performance review cycle here at Unbounce.
And you know it’s super important that people that we get
that qualitative feedback from if they’re feeling misalignment,
it’s not just about the numbers.
It’s it’s exactly what you said it’s about.
We want to keep our good people here.
We want to make them happy and to keep them engaged.
And so that alignment has to be there, or else they’re going to find
someplace else to go. Yeah, 100%.
All right.
Let’s jump into another big idea alignment as an operating system
so that it shouldn’t be treated as just an initiative.
It’s the foundation of the business.
So how do you know if that foundation is cracked and what a leaders need to do?
Yeah.
So most cracks are going to be the symptoms of not having that
alignment operating system we talk about again. Right.
It’s not about having an initiative.
We know that initiatives in this instance, this is such a massive business
transformation that touches all parts of the business
that it just can’t be a campaign.
It cannot be an initiative.
It has to have full support.
All the way up to leadership and why I say that,
and I’ve seen this play out multiple times.
You’ll have sales and marketing leaders on board.
They want to work together differently.
They have some quick wins, things are going well.
And then all of a sudden the pressure mounts and they need to hit quota.
They need to make the number.
Some new leadership is not brought in about this whole sales
and marketing thing, because they see it as like a qualitative collaboration,
you know, work together better sort of thing
because it hasn’t been framed up properly
and you haven’t earned the right to really embark on this transformation
because you don’t have a strong business case.
And then they will we’ll tell them, like, stop it, halt!
I’m not supporting that anymore.
I need you to focus on core business, because they don’t look at it
as the core business.
And so that’s why I say that you really have to, again,
level this up to be like, this is the way we operate
because it enables you to do everything else.
This is not just about collaboration.
It’s not about just getting in a room together and saying like, you know,
let’s put some slogans on the board and say, like one team.
It really is about redefining the way that you do business.
I love that just Jeff.
It can really be a side of desk initiative when, you know,
the quarter’s ending or the month ending, but it really can’t be a side
of desk initiative.. It has to be the initiative.
So I love that.
Jeff, I want to dive into the rest, but we are running short on time.
We like to keep closing time episodes pretty short
so folks can grab them in bite sized chunks.
Can I invite you back to go over the last two and really dive into the last one?
Because I know there’s some meat there.
I would absolutely love the opportunity to to come back and talk about the last two
big ideas.
Okay, great.
In the meantime,
if folks want to learn more about you or your work, where should we send them?
Yeah.
Best places to find me on LinkedIn.
Meet Jeff Davis is my handle.
And then you can also check out my book,. Create Togetherness on all platforms
and or go to Createtogetherness.com and it will lead you to the Amazon link.
Awesome. Okay.
Jeff’s coming back, and you should, too.
Thank you for so much for joining us for this episode of Closing Time.
Remember, you can get this episode and all the rest delivered
right to your inbox.
Just click the link in the show notes and we will see you next time with Jeff.
