Sales and Marketing have the same goal:
To attract and close customers.
Both teams have information about the prospect that the other team does not—and that’s hurting everyone, says A. Lee Judge.
In his highly-rated presentation from B2B Forum 2024, Lee reveals how communication between Sales and Marketing benefits everyone. Watch part of Lee’s presentation or read the transcript below.
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C.A.S.H.
Now this is an acronym.
It isn’t just the fact that any organization needs cash to operate, but I found out…
These are the four things that every organization I’ve worked with, who had issues between Sales and Marketing, if they could solve these four things…
These four things are communication, alignment, systems, and honesty.
C.A.S.H: Communication, alignment, systems, and honesty.
So here’s the framework.
Let’s start with communication.
It is a two way street between Sales and Marketing. I want to make sure I hear you and know that you hear what I’m saying.
So when I say, “Marketing to,” I want you to yell out, “Sales.” And when I say, “Sales to,” I want you to yell out, “Marketing.”
Communication is a two-way street, from Marketing to (Sales!). And from Sales to (Marketing!).
One more time. From Marketing to (Sales!). And from Sales to (Marketing!)
I want to make sure that sticks in your head.
Now, are there any salespeople here today? Anybody from Sales? 1, 2, 3… Okay, I’m going to be talking about you a lot today.
Only because, if there’s ever a disconnect, most is from Sales to Marketing.
Marketers. We’re typically screaming to Sales to hear us, and we don’t hear it back from Sales.
So part of our job as marketers is to help foster this relationship, and foster this communication. We’re going to give you some tools to do that. So here’s the importance of it.
First of all, understanding customer needs.
As a marketer, if you’re creating content, you will always create better content if it comes from communication with Sales.
Your best content comes from your salespeople who are on the front line talking with your customers. You’ll give better service, you’ll keep customers longer, if you talk to your salespeople—and you force them to talk to you.
What is the market asking for?
I remember a situation where, as a marketer, we were all excited about our marketing campaign. And we’re presenting in a sales meeting. And we realized…
Sales wasn’t listening!
They didn’t care. They weren’t on board with this new thing we’re marketing.
Turns out, sales knew that their bread and butter came from an existing product.
They didn’t want the new product because they’re doing fine with the old product, right?
So we had to communicate that.
Sales and Marketing have to have the same meetings. If you’re a marketer, push yourself into the sales meetings. Otherwise, you’re going to be screaming into a void, pushing things and beating your chest about things that they don’t care about.
If you don’t know what happens in the sales meeting, if you don’t know what the CEO is yelling at the VP of sales is about, then you don’t know what to market.
You have to be in the sales meeting to hear what’s going on.
What products drive revenue?
What activities were wasteful? Trade shows, for example: you need to know which ones didn’t work.
You can have all your beautiful marketing KPIs.
“Hey… participation is up, and we got so many downloads as people came by our booth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
But did you close any deals?
If you don’t know that, while you’re screaming about, “hey, look how great we are,” they’re going to be silent and go, “yeah, I hear you. I hear you. So what line item do we cut? Is it going to be that person in Marketing because the trade show didn’t work?”
And so we have to collaborate effectively to have this communication and visibility of the entire funnel.
Lemme ask you this. Now, this is something that I almost know the answer already, but I want to just see the hands, especially considering the makeup of sales and marketing people—it is a marketing conference, so I see the different hands depending on who I’m talking to.
For your marketing automation platform, how many of you of course, have licenses to your market automation platform? Raise your hands… keep your hands up.
Drop your hands if you don’t have access to the CRM. Almost all of you do.
When I do this to a sales group, it’s just the opposite.
Sales has access to their CRM, but very few have access to the market automation platform.
Now, that could be because of the licenses.
But it’s also because Marketing hasn’t communicated the value that they get from the market automation platform. We’ll get into that more later.
This scenario was where, as a marketer, I made myself into the sales meeting. I always pushed into sales meetings to make sure that, whatever I was bragging about, made sense and had value to the sales team.
In this scenario, the CEO was out to cut trade shows.
He had three salespeople who were defending their trade shows.
The first salesperson said, “yeah, last year I got tons of business cards and I talked to a lot of people…”
CEO says, “show me the money,” basically. “Where the opportunity’s at?”
“Oh, well, I have those cards in my desk.”
Show cut.
Next person: “Well, yeah, I’ve got all this stuff in the CRM and I got all these leads in from the show. They’re in the CRM.”
And CEO says, “what happened?”
“Oh, well… they’re in the CRM!”
Cut!
Third person was the VP of sales. Had been working with me at the time, marking director.
Long before the trade show, we had pulled personas of who’s going to a trade show, who went last year, who we knew from last year, who would likely go.
We had this database.
We started an email campaign, we began emailing them.
We began setting meetings.
We began tracking all their activities on the website.
We set up webinars based on what we’re going to be doing at the trade show…
All this marketing work!
So when the trade show came up, he set meetings. He knew who we had been talking to, tracked it through the CRM, closed the deals, and knew exactly what was affected by the trade show.
Now, notice I said, “affected by,” not “solely sourced by,” because we do a lot of marketing.
Turns out, because he had the data in the CRM to show, the biggest client the customer had won that year was from a trade show.
Now, it could have happened other times.
But the other guys didn’t have the data to show it. It wasn’t in the CRM.
So that collaboration with Marketing, from marketing automation all the way through the final revenue reports, allowed him to show and save his trade show—which was the most expensive, but it also landed the biggest client—because he could prove it.
So communication main focus points:
Attend the meetings. Push your way into the meetings. Otherwise, you don’t know if the things that you say are important are actually important.
Share your prospect’s pain and language. This is where your salespeople know your prospect’s pains and their languages.
You don’t want to be caught, as a marketer, marketing your brand new Widget 3000… when your customer calls it a screwdriver!
Because then your language doesn’t resonate with them. You don’t know what they’re actually buying. You don’t know what they call it.
You need to make sure that your salespeople say, “you know what? Our clients don’t even know what this thing is. They don’t even know this internal name. They just want something fixed. They want a screwdriver.”
Say, “we sell screwdrivers.”
Not, “the most innovative, bolt moving, nail making, board building innovative machine: a Widget 3000.”
Just say screwdrivers. Get that information from talking with your sales team.
Share the customer’s tracked activity, of course.
You don’t want your sales people going into a meeting with a client, thinking it’s the client’s “day one,” when the client has been with you, looking at webinars and trade shows and white papers, all this time.
Think about how unconvincing your salesperson is when they say, “hey, have you heard about this thing with sell?”
Meanwhile, the [client’s history is] all in your CRM, or your market automation platform. So empower them with the content. Let Sales know you have the content.
Published April 9, 2025
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