Q&A | How Do You Solve for a Siloed Marketing and Sales?
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Hey, folks. I'm Mark Roberge, and this is The Science of Scaling, a podcast about how to scale your sales and revenue. We have another Q&A episode today. And as usual, my favorite producer, Matt Brown, is here to help. Matt, what's the question for today? All right. So for today, we're talking about the marketing and sales teams. Specifically, what's your solve for a siloed marketing and sales? Yeah.

That's key. And that's one of those things that it's been broken for decades. We're getting better at it and it's critical, you know, because when I go out and geez, I've probably worked with 500 sales and marketing teams, at least between like all the sales we did at HubSpot and all the investments we've done at Stage 2 Capital. And, you know, I think I don't mean to offend anyone, but I think most folks would chuckle at this, that like,

sales and marketing leaders don't naturally get along. You know, like I think a lot of salespeople think that marketing does arts and crafts all day and marketing thinks that salespeople are spoiled brats, you know? And, and they just like, that was how it was, you know, in the nineties or whatever. And that was fine because like marketing, what were they were doing? Like events, they were doing billboards, they were doing TV ads, print ads. But now,

We've been operating in this world where the buyer starts in a domain that's owned by marketing, email, online, social media, and progresses to a domain that's owned by sales, a Zoom call, an in-person meeting, demo, whatever. So if you don't figure this out, you're kind of cooked. And if you get this really going well, it's hard to do. And that's a competitive advantage.

So it's an important question, Matthew. And it's one that we've been working on for some time and still have work to do. So let's get really tactical on how we solve it. The first step is we've got to get sales and marketing leadership in a room and agree on each other's responsibility. So that usually starts with, okay, we could probably attribute

demand like opportunities sales back to either marketing generated or sales generated now we're gonna have to come back to that because that can be complicated but let's assume that we can get pretty close and now we can go into a quarter or a year or whatever period we're talking about and agree that this much pipeline and sales will come from marketing and this much will come from sales so let's say it's 50 50. so we agree that half the pipeline is going to come from marketing

They're spending money on digital ads, content marketing, email, events, whatever. And then half of it's going to come from sales. And I like to put the SDR team in sales. Okay. So it's like SDRs that are cold calling. It's salespeople that are generating their own demand. Now we've got at least the starting point around a responsibility. Okay. So now we got to work on the marketing side. So, you know, what is a marketing qualified lead?

Like the sales and marketing person have to agree on that. And this is where like whoever they're reporting to, whether it's the CRO or the COO or CEO, they're going to have to do a little bit of mediation because they're both going to come up with a very self-serving definition, right? Sales is going to say an MQL is a CEO of a fortune 500 company that requests a demo on our website, right?

Like totally unattainable, right? They want the sale like handed to them on a platter and marketing is going to say an MQL is anyone that fills out a form and gives us their email. Like that doesn't work either, right? So we have to have some parameters of what an MQL is. Now, here's a couple of guidelines on that definition. First off,

I like an MQL definition where you can tell if the lead fits without talking to the contact. So where are they in the world? How big is their company? Employees, revenue, what sector are they in? You know, like these are things I can tell without talking to them. And oftentimes I can automate that with some of the data enhancement capabilities that are out there.

Something like, do they have a need for my product? I don't like that in MQL. Because it's like, that's just too hard for a marketer to get. It's like they can prospect to segments and regions, but that's our job in sales. And that's the definition between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead is once it's sales qualified, it means like, let's just focus on something as basic as Bant. Do they have budget? Do they have authority? Do they have need? Do they have timing? Like marketing can't control that.

So that's what we have to figure out. And of course, we're going to have a fall off from MQL to SQL conversion. And that's just a reality. And that kind of goes into the math of like how we get to the contribution to pipeline and sales that marketing is going to do. Okay. The other mistake that is made by almost everybody still is they include role in the definition of MQL. Like the lead has to be from a VP or above. That's crazy.

Because it's like almost every organization is generating leads from marketing, like you're largely inbound, and then from cold calling. And you're telling me that if a lead comes in from a perfect fit company based in New York City with a thousand employees and they're in the manufacturing sector and that's a perfect company for you and the intern downloads the e-book,

That your sales rep is not going to call them, but instead they're going to cold call a bunch of people who've never heard of you. That is crazy. Who do you think told the intern to download the ebook? The boss of the boss of the boss of the boss. And that's our job is to sell and talk to the intern and be like, you have a couple options there. You call the intern and say, Hey, what do you need help on? I'll let me help you. And by the way, who told you to do this? And now you're off and running or just call the decision maker and be like, Hey, we've been getting inbound inquiries from your boss.

your company, I'd love to chat and find out what's going on. But either way, it's like to say, oh, it's not an MQL and we're not going to call it because it's not a VP or above. It doesn't make any sense to me. So now we've got a definition of MQLs and we also have a quarterly target on marketing contribution. So now it's very clear at the end of the quarter, do they do it or not?

It's a very clear definition that the VP of sales and the VP of marketing have agreed to. We don't get to the end of the quarter and be like, oh, we missed because it was marketing and the lead sucked and the salespeople suck. It's like, no, we agreed that marketing was going to generate 164 MQLs in the quarter.

And if we stuck to our MQL to SQL conversion of 75% and our SQL to pipeline conversion of 50% and our pipeline to customer close conversion of 45%, then we're going to hit our number. So why did we beat the number or miss the number? Oh, our pipeline to customer close was lower. Okay, well, what's going on there? Or they didn't generate the MQLs that we promised. Then maybe it is marketing's fault. Okay, so that helps a lot. And then the last piece, Matthew, is...

on the sales side. Because, you know, that's our job. If we've quarter over quarter over quarter, you know, have converted 57% of MQLs to SQLs and all of a sudden one quarter that drops to 39, well, what happened? Did we still, you know, call them frequently, call them quickly, call them and reach out with the personalization that's required? I can inspect that. And so we have guidelines on how that needs to happen as well. Now, all this

Moves into what we like to call a sales and marketing service level agreement or SLA I think we're used to the word SLA and like IT like hey AWS says we promise you your servers gonna be up 99.99% Well, that's what this is. This is a sales service level agreement between folks So hopefully that gives you some guidance Really tactical and how to do it step one get sales and marketing in a room together. It's usually leaders step two

define how much of the pipeline and revenue is going to come from marketing and how much is going to come from sales. Step three, that allows you to calculate how many MQLs and define that MQL appropriately. And step four, sales doesn't get off the hook. They need to follow up frequently, quickly with a high degree of personalization. And we define that. And then the final step is like reflect at the end of the quarter.

And if you miss or exceeded, it's because something was off from that forecast and it's non-negotiable and you can't argue about it. And then lastly, you come to the end of the quarter and you either missed or exceeded and you know exactly why. And the SLA, the service level agreement between sales and marketing holds it all together. Hope that answers your question. These are great. Thanks so much.