Four Ways You Are Marketing Backwards. Has Marketing signed on for a quota? Why not?

Quota? For Marketing? What?

Absolutely, and it’s a great idea! Here’s why.

Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus
Most organizations experience this odd tug-of-war between Sales and Marketing, in which both spend more time complaining about the other’s performance than hitting goals. More often than not, I find this misalignment between Sales and Marketing can be attributed to a single factor: lack of shared goals.

Let’s face it, you motivate your team towards the specific performance goals by which your team’s success is judged. Hopefully, those goals are closely tied to overall organizational goals that, since we are generally working in for-profit companies, somehow roll up to revenue and profitability. Even if you are a charitable organization, your goals are probably related to raising funds (revenue) for your chosen charitable purpose. If Marketing’s goals do not tie back to these same revenue-based goals, you immediately are at odds with Sales, whose goals are definitely tied to hitting a revenue number. Let’s look at an example.

Lead vs. Revenue: Vegas Oddsmakers Have Leads at 3 to 1

Let’s say Sales success is tied to a revenue goal for closed business. Marketing success, however, is tied to Leads generated. These seem to be compatible goals. In practice, what happens is Marketing calculates the number of Leads necessary to hit the Sales revenue goals and begins to deploy various campaigns to generate Leads. Sales approaches the end of the quarter and is shy of their quarterly goal (we’ve never heard that before, right?), and asks Marketing to ramp up Lead production. With the lead-time necessary to ramp up new campaigns, Marketing can’t possibly generate the Leads requested in the time requested. Answer? Change the “definition” of a Lead to allow more to pass through to Sales. Problem solved. Marketing has exceeded its quarterly goal for Lead generation but, because the Lead quality dropped, Sales actually misses its quota by more than predicted while doing twice the work to call on low quality “Leads.” (For more on this subject, see Sales Thinks Your Leads Stink.)

The problem is obvious. What’s worse, I have seen this happen in billion-dollar companies more often than any self-respecting Marketer should want to admit. Is it any wonder Sales thinks your leads stink?

Change the conversation.

Fortunately, the solution is as obvious as the problem. Shared goals – based on revenue – will create a Sales-Marketing team working together, rather than competitors working against each other. So why not partner with sales around shared revenue goals? Start the conversation from the Demand Gen side, and see if the dialogue with Sales starts to change from “Your Leads stink” to “how can we work together to uncover the best Leads?”

Notes:

Work with Sales to define shared goals.

Define your goals using the same metric as Sales: closed revenue.

One of the side effects of not having shared goals with Sales is knee-jerk response. In the “real-life” example above, it is entirely predictable that sales will inevitably come to the Demand Gen team at each quarter end, looking for more Leads. What they really need is more closed business. However, Sales has a tendency to scream loudly and when Sales screams, the C-Suite assumes there is something wrong, revenue projections will be missed, the stock will tumble, shareholders will revolt and… well, you know the rest. If you are constantly reacting to Sales, rather than executing against a sound strategy, you need to read next week’s edition of {Demand Gen Brief}: Four Ways you are Marketing Backwards, Part 2.