Salespeople are more likely to leverage marketing expertise when they tie it directly to acquiring new customers.
By Christopher Gale
In-house sales and marketing teams, which too many companies silo from each other, are struggling to overcome the effects of new disruptive technologies, labor market shortages, and costlier capital. Most aren’t looking inward to transcend these problems as they seek to grow their businesses, however. Instead, they are tolerating what I would argue is hampering them most: orthodoxy.
Firms are pulling back as financing becomes uncertain. They’re focusing on efficiency and tightening their standard operating procedures to save resources. They’re putting off new initiatives that, a year or two ago, they would have billed as essential to opening up new markets and challenging new incumbent competitors. Sales and marketing are therefore under pressure. They must deliver more with less while adhering to the same old playbook.
These moves might appear responsible. They’re equivalent to following the herd, which sometimes can be a prudent strategy. Chief executives should ask themselves, however, whether conventional responses to today’s market conditions are apt when AI is transforming nearly every industry, talent pools for vital professionals are drying up, and the era of zero interest rates is fast becoming a historical anomaly.
Such orthodox thinking creates blind spots for sales and marketing teams that must embrace creativity to succeed. At best, these blind spots result in fewer new customers. At worst, they create opportunities for competitors to steal your base or lull you into a false sense of security that ends when macro shifts leave your company behind. These surprises especially threaten companies that separate their sales and marketing teams.
False dichotomy
Salesfolks understandably rely on personal contacts and other subjective methods to land customers. As a public relations and marketing executive, I know that many great salespeople barely tolerate the research, profiling, outreach, and advertising that is their marketing colleagues’ bread and butter. They find leads through human interactions. They like it that way because it succeeds, or else they wouldn’t be salespeople.
On the one hand, these sales teams are obviously taking marketing for granted. I’m sure they would notice very quickly if their marketing partners weren’t beating the bushes on their behalf. But, on the other hand, they have a point. Too many marketers are happy to hold meetings where nothing is decided, write copy that nobody reads, and arrange media interviews that don’t necessarily help the bottom line immediately – though, I would argue, nonetheless provide immeasurable value. These are their deliverables. They attract or reveal leads and support sales operations. Closing deals is not their job.
The solution to this problem is simple – link sales directly to marketing. That makes marketers feel leery, of course. But courageous marketers welcome this accountability. The best marketers should have established mechanisms to track and measure how their outreach is performing, who responds, and whether salesforces would have connected with a new lead if not for marketing.
In my experience, this approach triggers a virtuous cycle. Salespeople are far more likely to leverage the expertise of marketers whose performance is directly tied to the acquisition of new customers. Marketers, in turn, become sharper when they prove what works.
Niche knowledge
Breaking down the siloes between sales and marketing teams is part of the unorthodox thinking that CEOs and CMOs should encourage in general. This approach is particularly worthwhile today, however, because it’s a great way to think about how to use outsourced marketing teams. Business leaders who have been retrenching into their comfort zones in response to the current difficult times, rather than sallying forth into new markets, should take note.
Executives interested in new customers and markets can’t possibly depend on their in-house marketing teams to quickly develop the knowledge and leads that their salespeople require to unlock new customer segments, especially if they expect their marketing team to continue fortifying their traditional markets, too. The marketing teams certainly have few incentives to devote time and resources to learning how to succeed elsewhere.
Leaders in this dilemma should tap outsourced marketers who have the niche background necessary. This approach entails risk, of course. It requires vetting vendors and deviating from the herd. It’s far less risky, however, than hiring new personnel or investing heavily in a long-term experiment that might go awry. It’s also a hedge that reduces the risk of missing out on new prospects.
The accountant shortage example
I’ve worked extensively with B2B financial service providers, including fund administrators, human resources executives from professional employer organizations, and fintech firms that offer solutions related to carried interest and compensation. These firms must keep their base happy while facing intense headwinds in finding new clients in an already competitive space. Amid these challenges, their salespeople look to my team for guidance in imagining approaches to find and acquire new clients who aren’t on their radars.
Many of these firms particularly seek to assure prospective clients that they can help them deal with an accountant shortagethat is rocking the financial industry. Their would-be clients need this talent, but fewer young people are studying accounting while older professionals are either retiring or demanding much higher compensation. B2B financial service providers assume AI will help, but nobody knows exactly how yet. Interest rates are pinching everyone in the space, too.
We’ve come to know many accountants, their personal histories, and the ways that our clients’ potential customers think about the role of accountants in their businesses. Understanding how in-demand accountants interact with service providers, for instance, is absolutely necessary background knowledge for marketing on behalf of our clients. Letting their salesforces rip without that information is a recipe for failure.
Our clients’ in-house marketing teams could certainly generate this solid work for new customers in new spaces if they weren’t busy mining their traditional segments. For a host of intelligent reasons, however, these firms can’t or won’t hire more full-time people to address the gap, even as they remain resolute about drumming up new business. Fortunately for us, they have calculated – rightly – that the gamble they take with outsourced marketing firms delivers net returns that they don’t need to leave on the table.
Christopher Gale is Co-Founder of Gale Strategies.
