The disconnect between sales and marketing teams that exists in too many organisations is leading to missed opportunities all round.
It doesn’t have to be a marriage made in heaven though, points out Aidan O’Driscoll of Align, an outsourced sales business that specialises in generating leads.
Founded by O’Driscoll in 2021, it was the culmination of sales career that goes back to his childhood, buying sweets low and selling them high to the kids on his road, aged nine.
From there he graduated to a teenage paper round, except that he charged per paper, not per delivery, and cleaned up.
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He took a brief swerve into academia, studying entrepreneurship in Maynooth, but used it mainly as an opportunity to support what was, by that stage, his full time job in international sales for an Irish company.
After increasing its turnover exponentially, others came calling for him to do the same for them, which ultimately led him to set up Align, initially from his kitchen table.
Today the business has a range of Irish and international clients and a growing team of sales generators, working from its offices in Ranelagh. It specialises in business development, setting up qualified opportunities for its clients’ sales teams to close.
O’Driscoll attributes its success to a focus on data, people psychology and delivery.
“We spend about €50,000 a year on data to make sure we have the right mobile numbers and business emails of the right people. But before we even reach out to them we understand their psychology,” he explains.
“For someone in marketing we’d be more expressive because they care about the story. A CFO will only care about numbers and the case studies of businesses you’ve worked with before. If you try cold calling an operations director and say ‘Hey, how are you?’ they get annoyed because you’ve wasted three seconds of their time. So even before we ring someone we know what their personality type is going to be, which makes that call more fruitful.”
Let’s be friends
But why is there ongoing tension between sales and marketing? “Why do they find themselves at odds with each other so often?” asks Winterlich.
In part it’s because, in relation to poor outcomes, it’s simply too easy for each side to blame the other, says O’Driscoll.
“Only in vary rare instances will parties have accountability about exactly what they are doing. A lot of the time it’s just easier to shift blame from one to the other. But what it really comes down to is how involved the two groups are,” he explains.
The successful client campaigns he delivers all start with workshops that bring together both sides.
“It means they are both interested and are both trying to influence the outcome, whereas in a lot of companies people just defer. Sales will just say ‘Oh that’s marketing’s job,’ and marketing will just say ‘That’s sales’ job,’ and so, from the get-go, they don’t get involved. In such cases they are already just set up for disaster,” he says.
Each typically works off different metrics with sales going after sales qualified leads (SQLs), those people with the highest potential of becoming a customer, and marketing looking for marketing qualified leads (MQLs), prospects for sales to nurture.
Only a portion of MQLs go on to become SQLs but agreeing on such metrics helps to bring better alignment. For that to happen inter-team communication is key.
Unfortunately it’s typically missing, which is what leads to an empathy gap.
Examples of this gap in action include instances where marketing makes promises a product doesn’t deliver. It is the sales team which is in the best position to provide that feedback back to marketing most efficiently.
Customers are very well educated these days, he points out, they know your competitors and the areas in which you are weak.
It’s why the flow of conversation from sales to marketing and back should be so valuable.
Unfortunately, O’Driscoll says, “It’s rarely a collaborative conversation, instead it is shifting the blame and throwing rocks at each other.”
Instead, he suggests, it would be more useful for both sides “to ask how can we learn together to position the product better next time?”
Striking while the iron is hot
Don’t wait until the end of a campaign to have such catch-ups, he cautions. Far better to facilitate regular knowledge exchange, ideally on a weekly basis.
Good customer relationship management systems are helping, not least by ensuring neither side has anywhere to hide.
“If marketing has a hot lead that comes in and it takes 48 hours for sales to contact them, by which time they are saying it’s a terrible lead, the fact is that 47 hours ago it was a really good lead. So data is about actually seeing when clients were reached out to, when prospects are being touched base with, and tracking that kind of flow,” he says.
There is simply no room for marketing to say its job is to create demand, and that it is sales’ job to close. “At the end of the day there is only one sale,” he points out. The aims are actually aligned, so their attitudes should be too.
After all, both marketers and sales people are target driven, it’s the nature of the role, he points out.
But possibly one grudge for marketers is that sales people get paid commission. It’s why some sort of split incentive, such as a bonus, would also help drive greater alignment, he suggests.
Another issue is that very often marketing people feel sales people have huge egos, he adds, before agreeing that actually, they do. It’s often an essential part of doing what is a really hard job; successful sales are simply punctuation marks amid countless knock-backs.
Having sales and marketing teams work a while in each other’s role, even just at onboarding stage, would help to foster more solidarity.
Says O’Driscoll: “There’d be a lot more understanding, a better community, and more conversation happening.”
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