If you’ve ever worked in sales or marketing, you’ve probably experienced the Blame Game at some point. It happens every time sales doesn’t hit their revenue numbers – the Blame Game begins. Sales blames marketing for delivering bad quality leads, and marketing blames sales for not following up with the leads they worked hard to deliver. The reality is that if revenue goals are not being hit, both teams are to blame. 

Why marketing blames sales when they aren’t reaching their revenue goals

Blame Game: Sales cherry picks leads and only goes after the low-hanging fruit 

This is something I’ve personally used as my argument in the Blame Game, and for a long time, I didn’t realize the root problem of cherry-picking wasn’t exactly sales’ fault. Cherry-picking is something sales does all the time, but usually out of necessity to keep up with the steady flow of leads marketing is bringing in, and it could be one of the reasons why they aren’t making their revenue goals. But cherry-picking is not the solution that gets the best results, because some truly hidden gems get overlooked in the rush to get all the leads contacted. How do companies prevent cherry-picking from happening? Well, for one thing, marketing needs to stop being held to the number of leads instead of the quality of leads. 

Reality: Marketing has its own quota to hit that isn’t conducive to quality

Let’s say marketing needs to bring in 5000 marketing qualified leads (MQLs) a year (usually the number one KPI for marketing teams). That’s around 416 a month. If there are five sales reps within the organization, each rep needs to follow up with 83 leads per month, or around four per workday. That seems pretty manageable at first glance, but then when you consider it takes an average of eight attempts to reach a prospect, it takes about 664 outreach attempts each month, or 33 outreach attempts per day, just to get those 83 prospects on the phone. That just isn’t reasonable for your average salesperson, especially because this tends to snowball month after month. So, it is understandable why sales would cherry-pick and go for the lowest hanging fruit – it takes less time and is much more immediately gratifying. 

Let’s take another look at the example above, only using a quality over quantity mentality. If marketing needs to only bring in 1000 quality MQLs a year, that same sales rep would only need to follow up with 200 leads for the entire year, meaning they would have a whole lot more time to focus their attention on nurturing these leads. They would only need to make 133 outreach attempts per month or around seven per day, so they would have more time to do a bit of research on the lead before the call, making their calls much more impactful, meaningful, and a better experience for the prospect. 

This also frees up time for marketing to ensure that the leads they are bringing in are quality – they have a name, a company, a phone number, an email, they’ve been nurtured and have been given resources to help on the buyer’s journey, they are in the proper market, they match the ideal customer profile (ICP), and they’ve expressed interest in speaking with sales. Focusing on identifying and bringing in qualified prospects and collecting all the information they can about these leads is a much better use of time than shuffling off 4000 extra leads on to sales that might’ve only attended an unrelated webinar or signed up for a newsletter. 

Blame Game: Sales doesn’t follow up with a lead quickly enough

Not following up quickly enough is a pretty widespread problem with sales departments, with an average response time of 48 hours – and even worse – 38-percent of leads are never followed up on by sales. Following up with leads within five minutes makes sales teams 100 times more likely to make initial contact – so unless your sales team is hitting this benchmark and/or hitting their revenue goal, your marketing team has every right to be upset by the lack of prompt follow up. Nothing is more frustrating than a quality prospect reaching out to the general marketing, sales, or company email practically begging for someone to pay attention to them because no one in sales has followed up. This is something that has happened in every single company I’ve worked with. 

The list of excuses for why sales simply cannot follow up within five minutes is pretty lengthy, and most are legitimate complaints. They were in a demo, or they were on another call, or they were entering information into their CRM (this, along with other administrative tasks, is something sales spend 66% of their day doing), or maybe they just went to the bathroom, ate lunch, or acted like a human being who isn’t physically chained to their desks. It happens! 

Reality: Sales should not be chained to inboxes and marketing can help automate follow up

This is where marketing can and should step in with their big, creative brains to figure out how to arm sales with automated tools to make their follow up process much more streamlined (not to mention help streamline their day-to-day tasks) and to remove friction for the prospect. For instance, instead of having a prospect fill out a form on your website for more information, then making them wait until a sales rep gets done with a demo to call them back, marketing could embed a calendar scheduling tool so prospects can book a demo without all the back and forth. Or marketing could implement a conversational chatbot that qualifies them immediately and then allows prospects to schedule a demo on said scheduling tool. Or maybe your company can invest in a sales development representative who does nothing but follows up with inbound leads and schedules time with more senior-level sales. Either way, with about 35-50-percent of sales going to the vendor that responds first, this metric should be high on the sales priority list. 

Why sales blames marketing for not hitting their revenue goals

Blame Game: The leads marketing gives to sales suck

While I’m sure your sales teams are a bit more tactful, the biggest complaint I’ve heard from sales is that marketing isn’t bringing in quality leads. And they are probably right! In most companies I’ve worked with, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) is the holy grail of marketing metrics. But does it really matter how many leads marketing is bringing in if those leads don’t in turn convert? 

But the prospect watched a webinar! The prospect downloaded an e-book! The prospect opened up 13 emails in the past three months! They gave our Facebook post a like! Well, that’s all fine and good, but how many of those webinar attendees, e-book downloads, email opens, or likes translated to actual, tangible sales? If these prospects didn’t want to engage with sales, then they are not ready for sales, and they should not be passed off to sales. But marketing teams pass them off anyway to hit their vanity metrics so they can pat themselves on the back and say they did their jobs (which, technically, they did do!). 

Reality: Marketing and sales are not aligned on what “quality” means for their organization

Or, more likely, marketing considers all these leads quality. They did download the e-book on what to look for when buying (the exact thing you sell), so that should be a pretty good indicator that it’s a quality lead…from a marketer’s perspective. Did marketing ever even ask sales what they would consider a quality lead? That’s a pretty important part of the process and one that is often skipped – so no wonder sales is thinking the leads they are getting aren’t quality. 

Let’s use ice cream as an example (mostly because I’m hungry and I love ice cream). When you go to an ice cream shop, you don’t just stand there and wait for the ice cream attendant to guess which flavor you want, then get mad that they guessed the wrong flavor. You tell them you want mint chocolate chip ice cream (because it’s the best flavor, duh). And if they try to give you butter pecan ice cream, you have every right to say that’s not what you want and throw that butter pecan in their faces (ok don’t do that). My point is, if sales never has a conversation with marketing, then marketers don’t actually know what sales considers quality. They assume they know based on the information they have available, but they don’t know. They might be giving you mint ice cream or chocolate chip ice cream but unless they are consistently giving you mint chocolate chip ice cream, chances are they probably don’t clearly understand what you mean. This is why establishing a sales and marketing SLA is essential – it keeps both departments on the same page and keeps both departments accountable. 

Blame Game: Marketing focuses on irrelevant content or campaigns

Marketing spends an insane amount of time planning, researching, writing, editing, crafting, designing, and distributing content, or multiple pieces of content in a campaign. By the time it gets released to the masses, chances are the marketer(s) working on that project have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into it. So it is a tough pill to swallow when that content isn’t generating leads that sales finds valuable. And it is equally frustrating when marketing asks sales for help in delivering this content to their network, something that is a pretty easy ask, and sales just…doesn’t do it. Even more infuriating is when marketing asks (sometimes begs) sales for help with coming up with relevant campaign ideas and they are met with crickets (or outlandish ideas that don’t fit into a budget). Having been in this situation countless times in my career, it can be incredibly frustrating, and it completely demoralizes marketing teams when they feel like they just spent three months putting together a campaign for sales that sales doesn’t even use. 

This is another reason why collaboration is so crucial to sales and marketing. Marketing spends most of their time and resources on content that sales just doesn’t need. This means that marketing is spending an awful lot of time, money, and resources on something that doesn’t directly help generate revenue. It’s nice, it’s pretty, and it may bring in leads, but no one buys $50,000 in software (or whatever it is your company sells) based on an e-book alone. 

Reality: Sales should help guide marketing with assets and tools they will use

So what is marketing to do? Well, for one thing, instead of asking sales for ideas for topics for an e-book or a webinar, spend time asking sales what they need. They may have no idea what constitutes a good webinar (although I’ve worked with plenty of salespeople who had amazing ideas), but they do know they need help writing an email sequence, or they need a case study for prospects or help sending a gift to a client that just signed, or a one-pager on the new feature that product rolled out, or battle cards to help them overcome competitive objections. Marketing should be spending an equal amount of time, if not more, helping sales build their own content library so they build their credibility with those leads marketing worked so hard to get sales to acknowledge. This is easier when included in that SLA I talked about a minute ago. Sales should hold marketing accountable for delivering the content that will help them close deals, not just hope for it to happen. 

That’s not to say marketing should just stop putting out content, or stop posting on social channels, or getting backlinks, or creating webinars. That’s the part of marketing that marketers usually enjoy the most. However, if marketing is not looping in sales at some point in the process, they run the risk of missing the mark on these campaigns. And I don’t just mean that marketing should ask sales for ideas, or feedback on the campaign as a whole. Marketing should be asking sales pointed questions, like is this blog written in a way that our consumers understand, or does this webinar touch on the pain points of certain prospects, or can you think of any reason why this email campaign wouldn’t generate the sales you need? Get specific – I promise sales will give you the feedback you need and are way more likely to use the content that they helped develop. 

The real blame game should be directed towards marketing and sales department heads

I say this with the utmost love and respect, but sales and marketing executives are really to blame. At the end of the day, it isn’t the fault of the sales department or the marketing department because those individual contributors do not create the KPIs, or benchmarks, or goals, or metrics that they are held accountable to and that often dictates their income and job stability. Sales and marketing are traditionally treated as separate departments with separate KPIs and metrics. Marketing teams are usually responsible for bringing in new visitors, social engagement, and leads, and their KPIs and metrics are rarely captured after the handoff process to sales. Sales KPIs are centered around the volume of calls, emails, and deals in the pipeline, and obviously, the amount of revenue they generate. And this is the reason why the blame game happens. 

Department heads should make an effort to foster collaboration, communication, and feedback loops between these two teams, and one of the most effective ways for this to happen is to give the teams joint KPIs and metrics. When both teams are not only held accountable, but incentivized, for bringing in leads, converting those leads, generating revenue from those leads, and then turning them into recurring, happy customers, everyone wins! Marketing keeps sales accountable because they have a stake in the game, sales keeps marketing focused on what matters, and they both work together to bring in more revenue for the company.

If you are a sales or marketing leader and you start to hear your teams do the Blame Game, it could be an easy fix – with the right help. Smark is here to help transform your siloed teams into a well-oiled, unified, collaborative, revenue-generating machines. Book a 15-minute consultation to see if Smark has a solution to your sales and marketing woes.