Why does marketing say something completely different than sales when January revenue is forecasted to miss?

While ABM (Account-Based Marketing) has helped to align sales and marketing at technology companies, there are significant gaps when it come to a rationale for quota miss.

A good percentage technology companies got off to a slow start on pipeline generation in 2019. There are many reasons for this (a subject of another one of my blogs)

I conducted a fascinating experiment with five companies who are already behind their January 2019 pipeline forecast and are expressing early concerns about a Q1-2019 revenue.

The experiment was the following. The CEO sat down with the sales and marketing teams separately and asks two basic questions:

1. Why are we missing our January 2019 Sales Quota?
2. What are we going to do to course correct and ramp revenue in February and March, 2019?

Here is what sales said:

• Our average sales time to close is 3-9 months, a January 2019 miss is a reflection of what we did last year rather than what did in the first three weeks of January 2019. Our new efforts in Q1 will reflect revenue gain in Q2 and Q3, 2019 revenue (very true at most B2B companies) However, CEOs will blame sales for not setting the company up for success in Q3 & Q4 of last year. In addition, CEOs wants to see immediate revenue results for Q1 and will refuse to accept average time to close as an "delaying excuse" (sound familiar)
• Sales often has national sales meetings, 2019 planning and conferences to attend in January 2019. While these are often worthwhile activities, these activities rarely lead to any form of short term sales
• Sales will say that they did not get enough MQLs or SQLs in January from marketing to drive net new pipeline
• Finally, Sales will say they do not have enough "At Bats" with net new prospect and or new net customers planned in January to meet pipeline velocity requirements.

So what does marketing say:

• They will say that they are just getting started on their new "Content Marketing Program" and indicate that this effort help to solve the problem. The CEO cannot wait and needs leads converted now.
• Marketing will point to engagement metrics with targeted accounts (all good stuff, white paper downloads, site visits, email opens) However, most of is early stage and does not directly correlate to pipeline opportunities.
• Marketing will say their job is to generate leads and not to close revenue. They will point out that sales does not follow up on leads and will share relevant learnings from last year
• And on and on.....

So what is a CEO to do. Be a leader and establish one joint metric for Sales and Marketing CEOs should meet every week on the progress with both team focused on one metric. That metric should be:

• Net New Prospect Meetings
• Net New Customer Meetings

This is simple powerful & productive if managed in a thoughtful & planned way, I would add that a "Hyper-Focused Accounts List" with a deep sets of specific contacts and detailed contact information is a critical requirement.

These contacts should have expressed an interest in your product category or should be direct buyers, influencers or buying team members. Few companies invest the budget required to build at an account-specific database in consistent way. Most resort to an expensive "Say and Spray" approach to prospect & customer. Most just blast everything to their existing SF.com DB. There are typically huge gaps in these DBs.

To fix & simplify this overly complex & disconnected sales & marketing process, please reach out to me [email protected]