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The CMO Council and KPMG hosted a webinar on how sales and marketing are redefining their relationship to enable new customer-centric purchasing paths. Webinar participants talked about new ways to collaborate across customer strategy and data, initiatives, technology, activities and metrics. Here’s an excerpt of the webinar:

Overview: The emergence of the self-reliant buyer and digitalized customer journey has upended traditional paths to purchase. More than 70% of marketers aren’t very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively. 

It’s time for a monster pivot, but to where? Old way: Single handoff of MQLs from marketing to sales. New way: Multiple handoffs of customer data insights. Old way: Separate strategies, activities, metrics and attribution. New way: Shared strategies, activities, metrics and attribution. 

(The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Bryan DeRose, VP, Business Development, CMO Council: What are some of the steps you’ve taken to develop shared KPIs to drive growth? What is the urgency from your executive team to put those in place?

Dan Schreibstein, Head of Segment Marketing, Capital Group: The first step was getting our marketing team into a room and ridding us of the legacy of how we talk about KPIs. Not to say that those KPIs aren’t important; we still use them to understand our marketing effectiveness. But we have to start using language that others can understand and show shared accountability to drive business outcomes. We actually put the sales goal in every one of our marketers’ objectives. I turned to Eric and said, “Look, the sales goal that you have is the same one that I have. We just have two different perspectives on how we get there.” We did a lot of work to bring the partnership closer together.

Bret Sanford-Chung, Managing Director, Customer Advisory, Marketing Consulting, KPMG: Now we’re talking more about the process and the people. Shonodeep, how did you go about doing that?

Shonodeep Modak, CMO, Energy Management, Schneider Electric: Some of the pieces were the KPIs that drove adoption. The other piece was the alignment and saying, “Is it really creating value?’ We’re not just trying to present the administrative side of the results. So we went in and showed [salespeople] that this particular customer clicked on these two pieces from newsletters, went to the website, explored this particular offer, attended these webinars. Therefore, you should try to sell them this sort of thing because of these behavioral attributes. That really shows value, because now you’ve given them a whole other dimension of understanding of the customer that they’ve never had before.

Bret: Aditi, before we move on, anything you want to add?

Aditi Uppal, Sr. Director, Digital Marketing, Centre of Excellence, Teradata: Oh, I agree with everything that everyone has said. Good to see that we’re not alone in this journey. It’s important not to forget it is an intimidating, overwhelming journey trying to bring sales and marketing together. I’m a huge fan of the crawl-walk-run approach. Executive engagement and alignment is so important as you embark on this transformation. … It’s a long, long way to go. But now we’re at a point where the C-suite knows the importance of having an integrated model — both sales and marketing’s accountability — to ensure the entire company benefits.

Bret: You mentioned needing to put sales goals on the marketing scorecard. You probably need to put CX on the sales scorecard, right?

Eric Grey, SVP, Capital Group: I’ll reflect that back from a sales perspective. We talked about marketing taking on the sales goal. We also launched a digital platform that’s important to our overall goal for scaling down market and for deepening engagement for some or our deepest engagers. We put that into the sales scorecard so that [salespeople] were incentivized and measured. We created transparency on how they were helping to get folks in the front of the funnel. They were very successful at it. 

We also have a simplified front end to look at how our business is doing at any given time — sales, sellers, share. And we added score, which gave us the ability to take marketing measures, present them to the sales team, make them co-responsible not just for driving sales, bringing new sellers in the door and expanding our share, but how they’re filling the pipeline and propensity to buy through time by supporting the marketing efforts and continually managing our messaging discipline. This isn’t an event. It needs to be showing in the same way consistently with the same kind of buying language through time.

Shonodeep: Can I ask a follow-up question? We’ve been less successful getting marketing metrics into our sales teams because there’s no incentive for them. How did you incentivize them in the case you gave? What did they get out of populating or contributing data to that metric?

Eric: We have a bonus structure that allows for a portion of that bonus to direct dollars to what we consider long-term investments in the growth curve, which aren’t going to pay off right now. We might use them for launching products that have a longer arc to sales or starting conversations with prospects that maybe won’t pay off for one or two years. 

In this case, we were able to take a meaningful bucket and say, we need to put hard numbers on the number of the right segmented advisors that we want to be having this conversation with … and actually get them behind the velvet rope with us in the digital product and act against it. The beauty of that is, over time, we were able through integrated data to go back and say, let’s look at a testing control, let’s hold steady, and let’s see what that did for sales. We were able to demonstrate that engagers delivered into the digital product at 50% more sales than those who didn’t. 

There’s constant tension between sales and marketing: sales has wonderful impact but they’re just not scalable and don’t get great reach; marketing has great reach but they’re just not having as much impact. But this allowed us to say that this sounds like a wonderful partnership with strengths that contribute to one another.

Bret: That’s great, really terrific, and gets to where both are heading in the same direction. We just go about it differently. I’ve talked to sales organizations that say they can’t build the business because they can’t scale well. That’s because they’re thinking about a sales organization as a bunch of people. We know COVID changed this dramatically. All of a sudden, we were helping sales understand marketing and e-commerce. From that perspective, we could help them scale.

Eric: Exactly right. Then you start to feed back these high-value impacts that marketing is having when they’re not in the room. It has a completely different flavor. All of that said, we’ve made an infinite number of mistakes along the way. We’re only sharing our successes today. (Laughs.)

How Are You Navigating Sales and Marketing’s Monster Pivot? is a webinar that takes an in-depth look at how marketing and sales leaders are changing the culture of their organizations to collaborate more effectively and win and retain digital buyers. The webinar is based on a CMO Council-KPMG report Sales & Marketing; Driving Revenue Through Collaboration. Watch the full webinar. Download the report.

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