Aligning Marketing and Sales: Strategies for B2B Success with Pam Dittner (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Dittner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B digital content marketing and sales enablement 7 minutes at a time. A fellow marketer from the B2B Marketing Exchange, Regina, asked me, hey, how do I get my marketing peers to shift their thinking so they can focus on helping sales achieve their goals? Great question. I have discovered that in enterprises, especially, budget, business objectives, and measurements influence how marketers behave and function as a team. If your marketing peers aren't supporting sales, one of the possible reasons may be that their marketing objectives or success metrics are not set up to motivate that behavior. So my first question to you, Regina, is how are success metrics are established in your marketing organization? The next question I want to ask is more philosophical. Should all marketing functions support sales directly? Well, my thought on that question is probably not. Some marketing functions are very much aimed at the top of the funnel. They focus on social media posts, traditional TV commercials, or even big billboards that you see on highways or in the big shopping centers. These types of marketing efforts are still critical to build brand awareness, but it's very hard to quantify their contributions to sales directly. Customers need to be aware of the existence of your product before they can consider or evaluate your offerings or services. Top of the funnel activities are hard to tie with sales directly. However, some marketing functions such as email marketing, event marketing, or demand generation campaigns are easier to tie to sales. In this case, you're right. It would be great that these marketing teams could work with sales directly. As their peer, I would encourage you to influence and educate them about the benefits of working closely with sales. A great example is to showcase that a close tie with a sales team can showcase their direct contribution to the bottom line. The best way to help shift that mindset and behavior is really a top-down approach. The VP of sales and the CMO are aligned on several key initiatives, and these key imperatives are part of the marketing plan. The CMO articulates how these initiatives will impact the team directly, then have measurements to monitor the progress. This will be the ideal to drive behavioral changes. You know how it is. The boss said that this is how we need to get it done, well, we'll do them. So Regina, it's hard, I get it, to align all the marketing peers to support sales. So do what you can to influence and educate them. At the same time, work with your management to get their buy-in. Again, send me your questions, you know where to reach me. If you like the podcast, please leave your comments on iTunes. Keep hustling, my friends. You got this. I'll see you next time. Bye.