It’s the fundamental question for marketing and every marketer today--are you helping sales or hurting sales? Yes it’s an unfair question--it absolves the sales team of too much of the heavy lifting and responsibility. It’s also the only question that matters. Sometimes it also doesn’t matter if it’s actually true as much as it matters that it’s perceived to be true.
I once worked on a marketing team that produced record results month after month and quarter after quarter. We stood up new functions that hadn’t existed before, and were supporting sales better than they’d ever been supported in the company’s history. It didn’t matter.
Sales wasn’t deriving the benefit of all our hard work. Was that partly on them? Sure it was. We had massive turnover in our SDR’s and would have to start over with like ⅓ of them every 60 days. We ran any event the field sales team wanted and they cancelled half of them or decided they weren’t worth their time. It didn’t matter.
Sales wasn’t growing, and the perception was that marketing wasn’t helping, it was impeding. So if that happens to you, don’t get defensive, don’t try to deflect and push it back on them, dig in WITH them and figure out where things are breaking down. And then, know that it may be up to you to go way over the line to fix it--for the sake of your budget, your team’s sanity, and even your job.
Having great marketing metrics and results at the expense of sales will buy you a few months of goodwill with the board, but increasingly, boards look at sales and marketing as one function. So if sales is hurting, that means it’s your problem too.
Make sales easier. That’s the job.