How to Bridge the Gap Between B2B Sales and Marketing

It was Napoleon who said England was a nation of shopkeepers (https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/period-glossary/shopkeepers) however, when it comes to new business sales in the technology, SaaS, and Services space where does it leave us?  Are salespeople the shop assistants of the marketing shopkeepers?

Misalignment between sales and marketing can lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities. It’s essential to address these challenges to create a cohesive strategy. For examples of effective marketing approaches, explore "Proven Examples of Successful B2B Marketing Strategies". Discover how digital selling strategies can enhance collaboration in "A Winning Strategy for B2B Digital Selling". To implement actionable digital marketing strategies, check out "Effective Digital Marketing Tactics for B2B Success". Lastly, uncover sales process roadblocks in "The Top B2B Sales Challenges Stalling Your Business Growth".

You'll Discover:

• The main causes of sales and marketing misalignment.
• How to define and track shared goals for both teams.
• Strategies to improve collaboration and communication.
• Tools to help integrate sales and marketing processes.

To be clear, I have a real beef with the way sales and marketing has evolved and especially the challenges B2B sales teams face.  It used to be said that the USA embraced sales as an honourable profession, land of the free and all that, but in the UK, it was and is still looked down upon by most people as not being a valid career path.  People became sales ‘professionals’ when all else failed, hence university graduates working in telesales because they couldn’t get employed anywhere else!

We are clearly at a stage where the decline of digital has resulted in B2B sales and marketing misalighment.  Yet, when it comes to starting a business or raising capital, apart from demonstrating how amazing the respective product is along with an equally amazing management team, the question on everyone’s lips is “how are you going to sell the thing?”

Business Plan Fiction

I’m not going to bore you about business plans that include fairy stories about sales and marketing – because that’s what most of them are – but I am going to raise the question about salespeople. It’s all well and good wheeling in the sales team to impress the investors but what happens next?

Ah! I hear you say, wait until we blow you away with our marketing plans.  Here we go again, more fiction. 

You’re probably thinking I've got a real downer on SaaS and Tech new business development, and you’d be right.  But to be specific, this is about the current strategies and tactics employed by today’s ‘professional’ shopkeepers, oops! I meant marketers.

Digital B2B Marketing Today

Let me set the current scene; B2B marketers use technology and tactics designed for the consumer market, i.e., demand generation marketing automation, pay-per-click, ABM, blogging, SEO and SEM.  Think I’m wrong? Then first you must analyse your own results against other businesses and do your own research to understand what’s going on and then determine what’s going wrong.

 I can assure you; this is a very serious matter.  Many B2Bs were shown incredible statistics of successes relating to marketing automation platforms.  Technology companies were sold on the massive ROI insurance companies or travel companies, or car manufacturers were achieving.  But they failed to realise these businesses sold to consumers.  We as consumers see something we like, and we buy.  Job done!

B2Bs on the other hand simply want to know if the new product, software or service will make them more money.  I’m not going to say ‘save money’ because what happens when you’ve saved all you can?  You’ve then got to get out there and start generating more income, so, it’s all about new business and ROI.

The trouble is, B2Bs cannot get traction.  They can’t call anyone, email anyone, or get anyone interested because the new business generation process has made salespeople impotent in favour of elevating digital marketing KPIs. 

Business owners and CEOs have been misled by CMOs and marketing departments to invest in copious amounts of MarTech SaaS which has since become the epitome of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

B2B Marketing Technology Stacks

Marketers love to boast about the budgets they’re given to manage, and the size and complexity of their B2B Marketing Technology Stacks, yet unsurprisingly they are not held accountable.  If new business fails to materialise, it’s the fault of the salespeople – every time.

CEOs have been duped into believing their salespeople can’t sell because marketing have created so many opportunities. How could any salesperson fail to make a sale with all these leads?

Here’s the rub.  Most marketers have no idea how to sell in the first place.  If they did, they would be selling themselves and earning commission.  Salespeople get fired for poor performance; yet marketers simply keep doing what they’ve always done, which is akin to an admin job. They churn out the same nonsense month after month and are not being held accountable because it simply looks the same as everyone else is doing in their respective industries or space. 

To prove the confusion, the average tenure of CMOs is between nine to eighteen months.  According to the author Seth Godin, CMOs take three months to come up with a new plan, twelve months to execute it and once it fails, they spend three months looking for a new job or they’re pushed.

I would add, CMOs can put anything they like on their CVs as no one is allowed to verify their previous performance due to privacy issues and confidentiality.  The best you can do is confirm they were employed.  Salespeople on the other hand can be asked to produce payslips or awards. 

Nevertheless, marketing departments replace one CMO for another and continue to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.  Do what you’ve always done, and you’ll get what you’ve always got.

The B2B Sales & Marketing Misalignment Statistics

The narrative is “how can this strategy be wrong if everyone is doing it”.  Goodness me, am I the only one who is jumping up and down about this?  The average turnover per person per annum in the UK is approximately £90k.  In the SaaS space it’s £80k.  The figures are not enough, which forces businesses to keep seeking additional funding believing that more marketing spend will increase their annual recurring revenue.  Think on this, Google achieve £2m pppa or ARR-FTE. Microsoft, £1m and the rest of the mere motals - not so much. 

Twenty percent of business go bust in the first year, 30% in the second and 50% by the third year.  Of businesses who receive investment, 40% fail, 75% fail to achieve their own targets and 95% fail to achieve an ROI for the investors.

The number of businesses that fail each year has not changed in years.  CB Insights published that over 50% of the reasons business fail are marketing related.

It stuns me that nothing has changed, until now of course!  I’ll come on to this a bit later.  But you must ask yourself, why does this continue to happen.  Is no one doing their research?  Ah!  But that’s a role of marketing, isn’t it?  Hmmm, no wonder they’re not screaming this from the rooftops.

B2B Sales and Marketing Misalignment Examples 

To understand why the sales element of your business is not working, you must become sensitive to the reasons behind B2B Sales & Marketing misalignment.  Here are some examples:

In 1983 I won an award for the best dressed window for Leica cameras. It was judged by the chief window dresser of Harvey Nicols in Knightsbridge, London. The point of window dressing is to entice CONSUMER buyers to walk in, look around and buy goods.

This is exactly what todays B2B marketers are NOT doing.  They are knocking out multiple weekly blogs to attract prospects; yet gatekeeping the good content to cajole payment if they are actually interested, i.e., to obtain their contact details; and then cold calling anyone they can to ask if they want to buy their goods.  It’s no different to your car mechanic phoning you, asking you to bring your car in so he can try and find something wrong and charge you.

SEO, SEM and Pay-Per-Click are all the same approach; here’s our shop and because you’re in the market, will you choose us? And if they don’t bite, you might be lucky and get their contact details and try calling them, to directly say the same thing.  

The next worst thing a business can do is believe telesales works.  Currently it’s a 300-1 shot to find someone who might be interested.  However, being true to form, when all else fails, get people on the phone saying, “do you want to buy…?” It’s worse than someone coming into your shop - this is going out onto the pavement and trying to drag them in.

When was the last time you even spoke to a BDR/telesales person, let alone made an appointment and bought something?  So consider how much effort is going into selling your prodects or services to other B2Bs?

Has Marketing Misalignment Erased Salesmanship?

Most businesspeople know what technologies are available, we’re not all living in a bubble.  Combine the awareness of multiple teams and decades of experience, most people in a business know they can achieve improved outcomes with various SaaS and strategies.  I’m not just talking about new business development.

Take it as read that we as business owners, entrepreneurs or CEOs have a desire and expectation for our businesses to succeed.  Therefore, we’re wired to keep our eyes and ears open for new or alternative ways of running our businesses to improve/increase the ROI.  And we expect our teams to do the same.  Steve Jobs once said he does not employ highly paid experienced professionals for Apple to tell them what to do, he expects them to tell Apple what to do.  The trouble is, it falls apart if the CMO hasn’t get a clue, refuses to do any research and plans to follow everyone else or simply do what he did in his last position.  Worse still, the CMO plays on fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) and keeps convincing a CEO to pay for all the MarTech SaaS and PPC!

So when it comes to the role of keeping a total addressable market informed and aware of our amazing products or services, we must maintain visibility and make our content freely accessible to as many potential buyers as possible.

We’ve all heard sales managers or trainers talk about ‘feel, found, felt;’ saying “people buy people;” “you don’t get a second chance at a first impression” and a host of other sales related wisdom word-bites.  Well, the same still applies. 

John E. Kennedy said, in 1905, “advertising was simply salesmanship in print”.  So how does this translate to today?  Business buyers, owners or CEOs want to self-serve, self-educate, remain anonymous and calculate their own ROI before speaking to a salesperson.  This is the silent conversation going on and no, no marketer or salesperson is allowed to muscle in on it.  I believe this is where the misalignment exists.  Its not about personas or segmentation, that just leads to more revenue expense.  It's about being real and deliovering what B2B buyers want.

Brent Adamson, formerly a Senior Vice President of Gartner for twenty-five years, advocated and promoted the benefits of implementing marketing automation for B2Bs.  In 2023 he published an article for the Harvard Business Review stating businesses were preferring to self-serve, self-educate etc., making demand generation and ABM a waste of time.  A month later he left Gartner and set up his own consultancy.  Funny that!  After twenty five years of towing the corporte line, he changes his miond, says what he thinks and then leaves.  Well, better late than never!

What you’re left with is the reality that none of the new business-related technology has been proven to have made any difference to new business development.  The necessary explanations have been replaced with misleading ‘enticements’ simply to obtain contact details for KPIs, and the sales element, on or offline, seems to have been lost in some distant past memory of the old-school salespeople, many of whom have since been fired for a lack of new business.  Oh the irony!

Where is the Style, Professionalism and Panache?

No one should be surprised why business are not selling or achieving their targets.  Going back to the business plan, the salespeople were the talk-of-the-town when the business got the investment!  Now they’re being blamed for the business failing and most of them simply say “the leads are no good”.  And they would be right. Glengarry, Glenross comes to mind!

Marketers are desperate to achieve their KPIs and, in many cases, will do anything to achieve them. Some are even placing marketing automation forms on every web page, and anywhere else they can, to inflate results and keep the bonuses coming in!

But they’re not leads, they are simply an acknowledgement that the content the browsers were trying to seek out was restricted behind a paywall called a demand generation form.

What marketers have failed to do is use the lead scoring capability of the marketing automation platform before handing the data over to sales as a marketing qualified lead.  So, when a so-called lead is passed over to sales and they respond by saying it’s not an MQL, and is certainly not a sales qualified lead, all hell breaks loose - not because of quality, but because of KPIs and money!

But here’s the thing.  Back in 2014 www.6sense.com stated 97% of buyers hated filling out forms.  In 2024, Jon Miller of www.Demandbase.com stated 100% of buyers hated filling out forms.  So why on earth are B2Bs installing demand generation marketing automation in the first place and secondly, who are the people filling out the forms?  Well, that’ll be the ‘non-decision-makers’ just having a look around, just like every shopkeeper knows. Remember when it happened to you the last time you were looking around a shop and the shop assistant said, “can I help you” and you responded “No, thanks, I’m only looking”

It's not just Misalignment: Wake up and smell the coffee!

The current state of play does not bode well for most B2B companies.  But there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

Think about the exposure you have been able to achieve over the past five years with the people you have in your marketing team.  Once you have been given the figure (approximately), now confirm as accurately as you can the total number who would be identified as being part of your total addressable market.

As an indication, in the UK there are 212,000 business employing 10-49 employees; 36,000 business employing 50-249; 6,000 employing 250-999 employees and 1700 companies employing 1000 employees and above - with the average turnover being in the region of say £100k pppa.  You will undoubtedly have a segment of the above total numbers.

The question is, if you’re in the UK, are you communicating with your total addressable market (TAM)? And if so, who are they, and do you have the names of the people in those companies who might be interested in your products, i.e., CEO to CXO etc.

Of your TAM, it is said between 1% and 15% begin their buying journey each week.  And keep in mind 86% of buyers complete their research before speaking to a salesperson.  If your sales-cycle is nine months, then a prospect oud be planning thei rpurchase for up to five years before they speak to a sales person.  And don't forget the changes the lockdown brought about. 

The likelihood your marketing team are targeting your TAM on a regular basis is very low on two counts.  One, it’s not what digital marketing teams do and two, your TAM does not want you to know who they are!  If they’re interested in your type of product, they’re hidden and silent.

Digital Marketing SaaS Misaligned for B2B Sales

To say it’s failed infers it was successful at some earlier stage.  Marketo came on to the B2B scene in 2008 along with Eloqua, Exact Target (now Pardot) and all the others, Hubspot etc.  If by 2014 97% hated filling out forms, it begs the question, did it ever work? 

When B2Bs started complaining about marketing automation effectiveness, Big Tech MarTech came up with the perfect response.  “You said it didn’t work”, they said, “Ah! you do know there are 17 people in the buying process, and you are marketing to them as well?”, and you said “no, we’re not” and they said, “let me show you our ABM software”.  The rest is history.

B2Bs have been made to feel as if they have failed because they can’t get the software to work and have also been made to believe it’s the person driving the software, i.e., the CMO, who failed.  He has, but not for the reasons you think he has.  I say, he failed to do the basics and do his research, which would have resulted in him telling the board of directors, “listen guys, this stuff doesn’t work, so we have to do something else”.  Instead, the CMOs double down and simply move from business to business, destroying them from within like a virus.

It's not the technology that doesn’t work, it’s the entire strategy.  I would bet anything you like, if anyone attempted to sell to you in the same way you expect your salespeople to sell to other buyers, it wouldn’t fly.  Firstly, it would be unusual if anyone ever got to make contact with you as your executive assistant would never put them through and secondly, when was the last time you bought anything from a company that cold-called you or your company?

Cut Out the Offending Problem

I have said many times before, get rid of the marketing department.  I know it is a bit harsh, but they are driving consumer-based marketing strategies, tactics and technologies that have never, and will never, work.

For the past twenty years or so, everyone believed digital marketing and automation was the way forward, including me. Not only did I start using the technology myself, once I realised I couldn’t improve my own business selling VoIP and CRM, I understood there was a bigger problem and set out to find a genuine solution.

B2Bs have accepted a marketing-based business model.  This is fundamentally wrong and the enormous amount of data that supports this is staggering. 

Only a sales-driven approach, that delivers everything a buyer is looking for, will work.

Implementing a Solution

B2Bs buy differently to B2Cs.  B2B buyers want transparency and authenticity, combined with anonymous, self-serve education, before they will allow themselves to be identified – just like you and me. 

Vendors like you need the ability to communicate to your TAM at scale, on a regular basis, making the sales process and engagement frictionless and desirable on the part of the buyer.  

Finally, anything you choose to do must be realistic and attainable at the least cost possible, especially considering the excessive costs incurred in the past due to failed marketing technology SaaS and initiatives.

The ratio of people to profitability must be brought under control to negate any request for further investment or external capital.

Traditional Sales & Marketing Merge to Become Digital Selling

To deliver everything above would be seen as a tall order.  Well, it’s done.  It’s in place, documented and ready to be implemented in your business.  And if I've got my calculations right, again, depending on me communicating to my accurate target market, you’ll be reducing you’re entire marketing budget by 50% to 75% and implementing a mechanism to place your exposure on autopilot and communicating to tens, hundreds or even thousands – every week.

You need businesses to get to know, like, and trust you before they’ll let you in.  If that’s what you're looking for, then call me for a quick chat and decide your next move.