Why Sales Doesn’t Take Marketing’s Advice from Wide Angle by Corey Mull

Why Sales Doesn’t Take Marketing’s Advice:
It’s a perennial complaint we hear from B2B marketers: “We did all this work to put together a great sales tool/piece of collateral/campaign, but Sales refuses to use it! What’s going on?”
Most marketers throw up their hands, call the salespeople a few choice names (“cowboy” is one I can repeat for a family-oriented business blog like Wide Angle) and just start plugging away again, thinking that someday those dastardly cowboys will realize what Marketing can offer. Others get frustrated and quit.
So what seems to be the problem? In our research into Sales/Marketing alignment, we’ve noted two things: first, salespeople reject 80% of the tools Marketing creates for them. 80%! And second, that the most important driver of this phenomenon is that Marketing lacks a real view into the customer/rep dynamic, and that the tools created don’t reflect the realities of that dynamic.
Two segments of our recently-launched Marketer’s Playbook address this divide head-on:
Sales support tools. As B2B deals have gotten larger, more complex, and involve more stakeholders on the buying side, Marketing in many organizations has stepped in to provide tools to lighten Sales’ load. As deals become more abstract, reps sometimes have trouble prioritizing opportunities, scoping solutions, and emphasizing key supplier differentiators.
Our resources in the Marketer’s Playbook will help you create tools that help Sales identify the most promising deals, collaborate with Sales to design tools, and launch tools in a way that stimulated adoption and usage. For solutions-focused organizations (which is most B2B companies these days), we’ll help you enable salespeople to select the most appropriate solutions elements and help salespeople surface unarticulated customer needs. Finally, we’ll help your Marketing team get Sales on the same page in terms of key differentiators to emphasize during customer and prospect interactions.
Collateral development. Shrinking budgets and consensus-based buying approaches have made it a lot harder to influence customers – and marketers are finding that traditional approaches to influencing stakeholders before, during and after the sale is more difficult.
Our resources in the Marketer’s Playbook will help you identify the design and content principles common in all best-in-class sales collateral and access tools to evaluate the collateral you already have. We’ll also help you design advocate-friendly, shareable collateral that drives internal consensus.
MLC members, check out the Marketer’s Playbook for more, and please let us know what you’re doing to bridge the divide in your organizations.