Sales + Marketing: The Alignment Equation

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition to challenge convention, with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles Studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. The marketing leaders in this episode are Lisa Cole, Dave Bornmann, and Marshall Poindexter. They share how they're breaking down the walls between sales and marketing, replacing finger pointing with shared goals and building trust that turns alignment into measurable growth. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review—you'll be supporting our quest to be the number 1 B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Welcome to CMO Huddle Studio, the live streaming show dedicated to inspiring B2B greatness. I'm your host, Drew Neisser, live from my home studio in New York City. Today, we're diving into a challenge that keeps many CMOs up at night. I literally got an email from a huddler at three in the morning their time to talk about the complexity of their relationship with sales. So this is about the sales and marketing relationship, and when we're all talking about revenue growth, this alignment between these two functions is make or break when it comes to a company's go-to-market success. We're going to explore how leading organizations are breaking down the silos, creating shared metrics that matter, and fostering a culture of collaboration that drives measurable results. Joining me today are three remarkable—wow, I'm gonna say flocking awesome—CMOs who have cracked the code on sales and marketing alignment. And with that, let's bring on Lisa Cole, CMO and Head of AI Center of Excellence at 2X, who is joining the show for the first time. Hello, Lisa, and welcome.

Lisa: Hi. Thank you. I'm really glad to be here. Thank you very much.

Drew: And so first of all, where are you this fine day?

Lisa: I'm in Rochester, Michigan. We are in a perpetual snow globe these days.

Drew: Wow. Okay, Rochester. Where—how far is that from Detroit? Where are we going?

Lisa: About 40 minutes north of Detroit.

Drew: Okay, all right, now I'm grounded. That's very helpful. So as you and I have talked, you've literally written the book on this topic, and of course, have sort of made it, you know, a profession to sort of crack the code of aligning marketing and sales and transforming marketing into a growth engine. So talk about what you've learned.

Lisa: Well, I think at the end of the day, the most important factor that enables an organization to align marketing and sales across that go-to-market engine to accelerate growth is they have to both be accountable to the same financial targets. You can't break that apart and separate it and create a situation where we have misaligned goals, objectives, and metrics that matter. Marketing should be as held accountable for pipeline, pipeline coverage, and conversion and velocity, just like the head of sales or the CRO would be. They need to be joined at the hip, end of story.

Drew: And I get it. And so I want to go back to the story I mentioned earlier, about the CMO who was pulling their hair out because the conversation was about marketing's contribution to pipeline, and it was the salesperson was saying sales—66% was their experience that marketing would contribute. And marketing, looking at the history and everything, was saying, well, one-third marketing, one-third partners, one-third sales. And it's like they were—that's a huge 2X, to use your company name—spread. And that's really significant. And you advise you got to be accountable on the whole number. But the salesperson was saying, "Well, fine, but what's your..." How do you resolve that kind of true gap?

Lisa: That happens when the CEO and CFO establish and try to assign or allocate credit for pipeline and revenue, you know, in these disjointed funnels—that doesn't work, right? Just think about the way B2B buyers buy things today, right? There is no such thing as a sale that gets closed without those buyers doing research online, without evaluating us against our competitors, without reading our content, without checking in communities for advice from people like them and companies like theirs dealing with challenges like theirs. And on the flip side of that coin, because I'm all up for sales, there is no such thing as a marketing-sourced sale, right? Like we depend on the seller's ability to develop those opportunities and close them and win them. And by the way, that doesn't enable marketing to be off the hook for the winning of that deal, where we need to enable sales to have really effective conversations, to do that and provide them with insights that could ensure that they are relevant, and, you know, kind of stay or keep those buyers' interest until they make a decision. So I think you could argue that marketing and sales invests a lot of money, and both of us invest our money to support every stage of the buying journey. So why separate and divide us?

Drew: And I—so I'm going to try to answer that so we can get a little bit deeper, if possible, which is the CFO is saying, "Marketing, I want you to be accountable for your spending. I want to know what value you're doing with it. So I want you to track something and show contribution, so that we can say that we're investing X percent of revenue in marketing, and that's delivering Y percent of revenue." And so there's this desire to have cause and effect—this, as John Miller would say, this gumball machine: put in a quarter, out comes a gumball. But there's still—you can't simply say we're not accountable, that our spend doesn't—is unpredictable in terms of the outcome. So how do you get to resolution? And it's to me, part of it is the question of attribution.

Lisa: It is, it is. And I think first off, when you talk about attribution, we have to be super careful. Attribution isn't marketing trying to take credit for a sale. Attribution is really just a mechanism for marketing to hold its spend accountable for actually having influence and impact. And when marketing shows up in a way where they bring that point of view forward to sales, to saying, "Look, work with me. I would like to track—I'm going to make these investments. I'd like to track to see if these investments have influenced either the sourcing or attracting new potential buyers, or enabling you to advance those conversations faster and for larger deals. If you enable me to close the feedback loop so that I can actually track and reconcile this, then I can make smarter decisions next year with the budget." But so I do think you need to have attribution, but I think the positioning of the attribution has to change, and it should very well be about holding your investments accountable. And the second piece with the CFO, when I think about being held accountable, I would like the CFO to ask me, "I gave you X number of millions of dollars this year to invest, and that investment is against these business goals that we have, and that could include a pipeline number for the collective organization. I need to know how you invested that and did those things actually influence the performance?" And so to me, it's the total marketing spend against the total pipeline revenue targets velocity. And then in that conversation with the CFO, I can then break down and say, "This is how I've allocated it, against new logos, against growth, upsell, against co-marketing with our partners to kind of drive that funnel as well," and then I'll be the first one to kill the things that didn't actually work. And we all know there is no such thing as all of the bets and investments that we make—they don't all work—but in partnership with sales, you really can learn a lot about which investments work and what to double down on the next time you invest. But that's how I've approached it with CFOs, and certainly how I approach it with sales. That's one of the ways that diffuses the tension between us.

Drew: Right. We have a shared number that we're trying to hit together. So from summer, you're not taking credit. Let's share the goal together, and then we'll figure out how marketing will support it. It sounds wonderful. We're going to come back to you for more of that, because I don't—it's never as simple as it is in this conversation. But let's bring on Dave Bornmann, who's the CMO of Higher Logic. He's an industry expert who's previously joined the show to discuss the first 90 days. Hello, Dave. How are you?

Dave: I'm good, Drew. How are you?

Drew: Excellent. Thank you. And where are you this fine day?

Dave: I'm in Arlington, Virginia, right outside of DC.

Drew: Awesome. And those are real—that's those are real cars driving behind you.

Dave: It is. I'm in a real office.

Drew: Wow. Gosh, that's pretty cool. A real office. So you've been at Higher Logic. Now, well before that, let's say you heard what Lisa had to say. And I'm curious, did you have thoughts that you wanted to build on? Go differently? What—where were you based on what Lisa had to say?

Dave: I actually loved everything she had to say. First, one thing that crossed my mind is, at the end of the day, the goal alignment—nothing is more important. My goal, my number one goal, is achieving our new logo ARR, our upsell number, and our churn number. That's all I care about. Of course, I have other things I care about that I work behind the scenes on, but those are the things I talk to the sales organization about. Those are the things I talk to my marketing organization about. At the end of the day, if you are organizationally, everybody hitting those goals, I find that the discussion about one-third pipeline, two-thirds pipeline—those conversations go away. They really happen when the numbers aren't being hit.

Drew: Right? Yeah, no. I mean, nobody cares about how you spend the money if you hit your numbers. You're absolutely right. And the reason that I've noticed in the last 12 months that this conflict has resurrected—because I gotta tell you, in '22 and '23 in Huddles, we didn't talk about this conflict because a lot of people were making their numbers or exceeding them. But they are now, and they're not hitting their goals. And so then all bets are off. And it could be macroeconomic situations, it could be any number of things, but there's, you know—and I'm curious if you had a thought on this, which is, there's a fundamental problem with net new logo ARR and even churn in that those are 18-month, 24-month, really measurement cycles. And yet you're looking in terms of marketing's impact on those things, right? You don't know what churn is going to be until you know they went through the first year or two of a contract. And so the actions that you do today, the decisions that you do today as a marketer, unless you're just spending all your stuff on DR, right—direct response—or we're just spending it all on keywords, and we know that there's limited return. I'm just curious. Let's imagine for the moment you're not hitting pipeline. You're not hitting your goals. Now, how does alignment—you know? What are the things that you can do with your sales partner to say, "Hey, we're not—you know, we share the responsibility. We're not eating the numbers. Nobody's happy. Now, what? How do we work together?" We have to either fix the numbers or lower the targets.

Dave: In a true partnership, you're sitting down in a room and really trying to figure it out together, right? We as marketers—I just presented at our sales kickoff last week, and I had a slide that has maybe 20 different bubbles on it, and it's all essentially the levers we have to pull on as marketers. And my message is, there's no silver bullet here. There's some combination of these levers that we have to pull to achieve the goals. I sit down with the sales chief revenue officer, sales VP, and talk. These are the things that we're thinking about. Here's how each of these have performed in the past. What do you think? This is what I'm thinking—like, literally figuring out together. A lot of people—I think sometimes sales gets viewed not as strategically as they should be, and they are equal partners, and they have great experiences to sit down and solve together. I think that can really go a long way towards that alignment.

Drew: Makes a lot of sense. I have imagined, though, that the sales person can't be necessarily old school. "Hey, just get us the leads, and we'll do the rest" kind of guy. And there are those folks out there. You really have to—if you're gonna partner and you're going to figure this out together, they have to be amenable to that, right?

Dave: They do. They do. But I've worked with some of those old school people before, so I get it. I think by and large, they're open to understanding, and that dialog back and forth, and the engagement at this sort of critical level of thinking—they can get there. I mean, you might have a one-off who can't, but by and large, I think you can get there.

Drew: Okay, so—so first of all, I just want to—the fact that you were presenting at the sales kickoff is an important thing, because I don't think necessarily every CMO does that, so that's good. What were some of the things that were going through your head as you presented to this group? Because this is not, you know, your head of sales. You're presenting to the whole team out there. How did you help them understand the way marketing is going to help them sell?

Dave: That's a great question. The person running the event for us, who runs sales enablement, coached me upon seeing my slides to make sure I told them very explicitly how this is going to help them on a day-to-day basis. And I assured her I was going to get there through my narrative. But similar to my comment about bringing the CRO in and having an engaging strategic conversation, I gave the sales team a little bit more credit and told them a story that was data-based and let them understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, why things like thought leadership are so important. And the last slide I got to, or the last section of the deck, was on the demand gen programs we're running that are going to hand them leads. I know that's what they care about, of course, but I think them understanding the full picture and all that we're doing is equally important. And I wanted to leave them with the message that I'm giving them leads, but our marketing organization is smart. It's forward-looking. It knows what we're doing. And give them confidence in that, in addition to "we're going to be sending you leads."

Drew: Right. Because at the end, they don't really care how. They care about the what, right? It's like, "Are you filling—are you giving me 5x or 6x coverage so that I can go and meet my quota?" So that's smart. I love the fact also that you went to the sales enabler and had the courage to get that input, and you told a story. I'm curious about that story. Was that like a customer journey story, so that you could sort of show that this is not a linear, necessarily, activity? Or what—what was the story, and how did it help, sort of, you know, get them to some mutual understanding?

Dave: You know, I have used that in the past, and I should have pulled this—that should have pulled that out, this journey that shows like the 25 touch points that we have in a real, live example. I did not do that. My story was less honestly story and more narrative around the value of helping educate the market, right? And there's lots of talk about AI, and we are introducing AI through our product set, and people have hesitancy about it. And I was explaining why our prospects need to trust us—trust us as an organization, trust us as a sales team, and want to do business with us in this world of uncertainty, and took them through all the different tactics we are employing this year and last year to sort of further that thought leadership position so that companies would be willing to do business with us. When they're a little uncertain about this thing, they want to do business with a trusted company. So I painted that picture and helped them understand why we're doing all these other things in addition to the traditional demand gen.

Drew: Right. So they—yeah, interesting. Okay, and they're trying to help them understand the big picture and the way sort of marketing works and things. So I love all that. All right, yeah, we'll come back to you, Dave, in a second, but right now, let's welcome Marshall Poindexter, CMO at YourCMO, who has previously joined us on the show to discuss brand values, rebranding, and customer-centric marketing. Hello Marshall, welcome back.

Marshall: Howdy Drew. Good to see you again.

Drew: Nice to see you. And how are you and where are you today?

Marshall: I'm doing great, and I am joining you from my home office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Drew: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. All right, you know that's where my father was born. Just wanted you to know that. So all right, and yes, deep Milwaukee roots. Okay, you've heard now from Lisa and Dave, and I'm sure that at some points you were nodding your head, and at other points you're saying, "No, I would have added this." I'm curious what, based on what you heard so far, what's your thinking?

Marshall: Well, you know, it's a little different when approaching things from a fractional perspective, because clients are engaging with you for a period of time anywhere from 12 to 24 months to solve some pressing marketing challenges or revenue challenges. And so you've got to get to it pretty fast. You've got to figure out where that misalignment between marketing and sales is right away. And one of the things that I do through YourCMO, as part of the YourCMO process, we have a foundation session with a prospective client, where we're figuring out who are the buyers, what are the unique attributes of the company and its products, and what are the potential ways to influence those buyers? But there is a step in that session where we do a sales mapping exercise, where we're going through every single step of the sales process and determining where are the most critical steps that marketing can influence and help move along. And so very quickly, we find out where sales is not aligned with marketing goals, and figure out how we can have joint wildly important goals or WIGs that both organizations are committed to from a commercial perspective. And so having that upfront before the engagement starts is really, really important, because then we start out of the gate. We get agreement on that out of the gate, so that then we can begin to knit marketing and sales together.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, essentially, before you walk in the door, you're creating alignment, because you're defining the customer journey, and you're defining where we want to get to. So you have that. So that is really important. But the difference is you're not taking the job unless you get that, because that's so fundamental, as you were talking about, and you use the language "sales mapping exercise." And I was thinking, really, what I wonder, does it change at all when it becomes a buyer mapping exercise? Because one of the things that Dave and I talked about a little bit, and I have seen be profound, is when you actually show the number of touches in a journey.

Marshall: Well, it's both. So as I mentioned, we do kind of buyer journey mapping as part of the foundation session. So we're looking at things from the buyer's perspective in terms of what steps they take in the consideration process. But it actually is important to do it from the sales perspective and match or mismatch that with the buyer. So, and that's where some of that misalignment comes up, is that sales thinks, "Okay, we got to do this, this, this and this, to move it along." But if it's not in alignment with how a buyer is making a decision, right? That's a problem. And that's where marketing can help bridge the gap and say, "Okay, being the voice of the buyer in this conversation, how can we make sure that you in sales are aligned with how the buyers are typically going to be thinking and how we can move them along in their thought process? What materials, what events, what content can we in marketing help you with, from a sales enablement perspective, to get that prospect to the next step of the consideration journey?" So it is both. It's not either-or. It is the buyer journey, and it is the sales map and making sure they're aligned, but then obviously it also links into the overall metrics that are being committed to and that you're driving towards in terms of revenue.

Drew: It's funny listening to this, and I'm thinking of a statement that I've heard many times from salespeople, not necessarily the sales leader, but sometimes the sales leader, and often a founder CEO is, "You know what? Just get me in front of the customer. I'll close the deal." And as I think about the reality right now that if they start there with a few exceptions, there are people who are just so gifted at sales that, yes, they can sell anything. But that's not true, because in today, because buyers have changed, right? And so how in this alignment, sales is thinking quota? That's because their compensation is based on quota. How do you win this alignment, make sure that they realize that the information that you're giving them about the customer, about their pain points, about how your product solves the pain points, and that the marketing that you're providing as the umbrella is the shortest distance to quota when they think they could just do it by getting in front of the customer?

Marshall: Yeah, and let me share an example from my last full-time CMO role, when I was at OpenEye Cadence Molecular Sciences. So biotech software company sells to pharma companies, biotech companies software that helps them model molecules as part of the early stage drug discovery process. A very long sales cycle can be anywhere from 12 to 18 months, sometimes two years, depending on when pharma budgets get finalized and approved. So it's a long process of influence. And one of the things that I had to do, I was brought in to basically build out the marketing team. It used to be a team of one. They brought me in as they moved from downloadable software to SaaS offerings. They needed to have a more full-fledged team. And so the sales team was much larger than the marketing team when I first came in, and they were doing a lot of that, right. They were saying just, "You know, just give me the basics. I don't need a whole lot of fluff here." And what I and the team that I brought in, that I hired, had to do was to help them understand, "Okay, first of all, we have to make sure that they understand the value of our products and the breadth of the products that may help them with specific use cases that these different prospects have." And so we had to really educate the sales team on the value of product marketing, on the timeframes around true demand generation, on the value of really engaging with prospects at events and conferences, having meaningful conversations that they actually helped track and document so that we could make sure that we were fully understanding where each prospect was, and then that helped us ensure that the handoffs from marketing to sales were more effective, so that we were giving them the truly hot leads that had demonstrated that interest over a long period of time. It was more than just that one conversation that they felt like they could just handle. Now they needed to see the totality of that engagement, and we were able to do that. We were able to educate them. And then I worked really hard with the head of sales to make sure we were measured the same way in terms of pipeline and eventual revenue.

Drew: I love it, all right, we're going to come back, but at the moment, it's time to talk about CMO Huddles. So CMO Huddles were launched in 2020 – it's a community of flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders, and it has a logo featuring penguins. Wait what? Well, a group of these curious, adaptable and problem-solving birds is called a huddle. And the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddling together to conquer the toughest job in the C-suite. There's a little pun in there, if you listen carefully. Anyway. Lisa, Dave, Marshall, since you are all incredibly busy marketing leaders, I'm wondering if you could share an example of how CMO Huddles has helped you. And I'm going to go backwards in terms, Dave, you've been with us a long time which we really appreciate – any fresh thoughts on how CMO Huddles has helped you?

Dave: Well, I think at the conclusion of this call we're going to be talking because I posted a question in our Slack community, which is a place I often turn to. As a CMO, you're often alone within the company. I mean, you get your team, but sometimes your team can help you, or sometimes it's something you might not be comfortable chatting about with the team, you can immediately turn to the CMO Huddle Slack channel and throw a question out, and often get an answer right away. Sometimes it takes a couple days, if not, someone from Drew's team will come on and help facilitate an answer. In this case, at the conclusion of this call today, I'm going to be getting an answer to one of the questions. I really look forward to it, but it's just a great, great resource, the general Huddles, the bonus Huddles, the one-on-one conversations, and the access to the community through the Slack channel – game changing.

Drew: I love it. I appreciate that, and I appreciate that you are on the Slack channel and that you're using it. And one of the things we do is we, for the leaders, the members of our community, we guarantee answers one way or another, and we get them. And occasionally it does take a day or two. Okay, Marshall, you've been with us a long time as well. Just curious, anything you'd like to share.

Marshall: You know, I am such an enthusiastic member of CMO Huddles, I have gained so much knowledge from all of the friendships and relationships that I have built through CMO Huddles, and the knowledge that I've gained probably is worth tens of thousands of dollars, if I would have had to pay consultants for that information. So just being able to turn to a fellow CMO that I've met through CMO Huddles has been invaluable.

Drew: I love it. Well, thank you for that, and thank you for your long-time commitment. And Lisa, you are a new member. I hope we've had a chance to provide a little value so far.

Lisa: I've got a lot of value in a few ways. Well, first, you know, I have appreciated the different types of calls you brought on, a lot of specialists and experts that kind of shared their best practices, in some cases to even help build our own personal brand. And so I found value there. It's also been super helpful, and just the regular huddle calls to hear other CMOs talk about their challenges and recognizing that I'm not alone, some of the things that we encounter day to day as CMOs can feel a little bit like crazy town, and knowing I'm not alone is awesome. And then, you know, it's also the opportunity to share with others that's rewarding. So I appreciate all three aspects of it so far.

Drew: I love it, and we happen to have a lunch huddle. And I told this story yesterday, but I'm going to share it because it's so relevant to me. So it turns out that in the Antarctic, a group of a huddle of penguins will get together, and it'll be like 6,000 of them, and there's a massive discrepancy between the heat inside the huddle and the heat outside. If you are outside, you are alone. If you are inside that huddle, you are 70 degrees warmer. And I like to think about our community as 70 degrees warmer as a result of pulling together. So if you're a B2B marketing leader who wants to build a stronger peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader and get your very own stress penguin, please join us at CMOHuddle.com. All right, enough of the penguins, let's talk alignment and like, who has to do this? I mean, is it the CEO who says, "Come on, kids, let's get along"? Is it the marketing person that says, "I'm not going to succeed unless I'm aligned"? In your experience, and well, maybe Lisa, go ahead and where do you start when it comes to alignment?

Lisa: I do think that the CEO is ultimately accountable for the alignment across the go-to-market engine. Whether they're intentional or not, some of the decisions that they make can completely undermine even the most well-intentioned marketing and sales leaders, simply by doing things like, "Well, what are the metrics that matter, and how are we going to get to that?" Even earlier, when you talked a little bit about the 66%, you're on the hook for 66% of this, and you're on the hook for 33% of the pipeline over here, and we're going to get 10% over here. That's one example of how to pit marketing and sales against each other.

Drew: I hear this in Huddles. The CEO will say that. They'll say, "Well, our CEO really likes to pit them together because it's a competition for resources, and so I'd like to see them battling." And that feels so 1960s, you know? It just doesn't quite feel right to me today, but it's out there.

Lisa: It might be the inefficient go-to-market engines—slides that say, "Oh, they're spending way too much money to drive their growth."

Drew: Interesting. What about you, Dave, in terms of your job? I mean, when you've done this, because you've gone into new companies, do you sort of see there's a vacuum there that it hasn't happened, and you just have to take it on yourself to make it happen?

Dave: Yeah, I mean, I'm wired that way throughout my career. I think, honestly, I've been successful in my career because I've always aligned myself with sales. Even before I ascended higher up in the organization, I just always sought to really understand the sales organization, the sales process, at as granular a level as possible, because I just think I would be able to do my job better with that deeper understanding. So I immediately step in and just get aligned with the sales executive. I mean, I was trying to think—you asked about being specific. I'm going to be general for a second: relationship building. It's it. You have to invest, just like you do in your personal relationships. You have to invest in them, spend time with them, understand them at a personal level. And that really goes a long way. And then once you get alignment at the, you know, CMO-CRO level, let's say that, then it's got to be everyone beneath you in both organizations understanding the value and sort of setting the example. I frequently will mention the conversations I've been having with the CRO—not to be name-dropping, of course, but just to send the subtle message that we are aligned. And I know it happens in reverse as well.

Drew: Yeah, oh, it's so interesting. And I think this is complicated right now with remote work. Your sales guys in one place, your marketing guys in another place. And if the two of you could just have a hallway conversation where you say, "Hey, we're going to present together, let's get aligned, and what are you thinking and how was your weekend?" And all of those things that would build an emotional relationship are much harder right now. So you really have to go out of your way if you're going to build a personal relationship with somebody. And I'm thinking even about the scenario at the very beginning of this conversation—if the sales and marketing people were talking a lot, there wouldn't be this "Well, you're this amount and you're that amount." It's "No, together we're going to get here," right? You just would have an emotional connection. Marshall, do you want to weigh in on this?

Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. So number one, in my most recent full-time CMO role at OpenEye Cadence Molecular Sciences, I needed a point to have a weekly call with the head of sales so that we were always checking in on our progress towards the overall revenue goal and the pipeline development and all of that. But I also—and we were both remote, so we were not seeing each other in the hallway like you were just talking about, Drew—so whenever I was where he was, I made a point to spend some personal time with him, hanging out, getting to know him, and, you know, tried to have some of those fun conversations virtually as well. So I agree with that building of a relationship. But I think the only other thing I'll mention is, similar to Dave, I am just built to collaborate. That is how I'm wired. But for me, it's absolutely critical to have that with sales. But I also believe that it's a four-legged stool in that you have to have a tight relationship with product and a tight relationship with customer success, and all four organizations need to be aligned from a go-to-market perspective in terms of a common revenue goal. And so yes, I made sure marketing and sales were first aligned, but then I really kind of pulled in product and customer success, because you're trying to retain clients through your customer success organization. Many times they have a revenue component too, and the product organization, many times, is getting that information from, you know, the prospects and the customers first in terms of what products to develop. So all of it's got to be aligned, all those people, all those relationships need to be strong, and you need to be working towards a common goal. So for me, it's the whole go-to-market approach with all of those functional leaders.

Drew: So Lisa, in theory, what Marshall says is absolutely true. We also know that it's rare because right now it's rare because very few B2B companies are killing it with their goals. So they're either misaligned or the market doesn't feel an urgent need to push them. So what—as you're hearing all of this, why isn't this a reality more, and what extra stuff do we need to do, at least in our individual companies, to try to make it so?

Lisa: Yeah, well, I do think it is hard work, and it is work that when you do it really well, it could seemingly slow down the work that you feel like you need to do as marketing leaders. And oftentimes, marketing leaders usually don't feel like they have enough runway to get and deliver on all the promises they made that got them the job to begin with. And so if you're already feeling this pressure to deliver as quickly as possible, and you hear all of these statistics around the average tenure of a CMO, and that just kind of adds on to it, if you think of all of that combined with the average deal size and how long it really takes to influence the pipeline and the revenue number—if you have to think about, "Well, I need to work on getting alignment with product and making sure that we have a plan around the customer that's customer-obsessed. And I've got to work with sales, and we've got to get clear about how we're going to fuel the pipeline and hit our numbers, and then I'm going to work with customer success, and I need to make sure that they're aligned with the investments that marketing is going to make to enable the conversations after someone has bought"—all of that stuff slows everything down. Now you can argue that it slows it down to speed up the work on the other side of the conversation, but it does feel like the collaboration, the work that you've got to put into it and then drive those alignments with all of those leaders, and then get them all on the same page too, that could feel like it takes weeks and months, and that's because everybody's so busy, right? Schedules, the time it takes to get alignment, get everybody—and if it's a global team, holy cow, like the schedules and the time zones can just only add to that feeling like it takes too damn long to get things done. Now, every ounce of energy that you put into driving alignment with those leaders, there's an exponential payback on the other side. Maybe one of the recommendations I'd make is make that work visible to your CEO and to your CFO. Like, what are the outcomes from all of that collaboration, and what impact can you expect from that work? And so you can at least relieve some of that perceived pressure to deliver something today.

Drew: It's funny, you mentioned the types of Huddles we had. Michael Watkins, who wrote "The First 90 Days," which is sort of the seminal book—it's one that, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the best business books ever written—and he talks a lot about the listening tour that you describe, where you're going in and talking to all those people. The challenge, of course, is the clock is ticking, and the CMO wants to make a big impact as quickly as possible. And that's the problem. So this email comes in, and then they say, "Oh, well, one thing I do have control of is brand, and I think we need a new color and a new logo," which will not impact sales in any way in the short term. So I see that happen a lot, whereas Watkins talks about getting that fake quick win. In other words, it feels like it's a big deal, but it's not, but it's still a win. Well, you know, landing page optimization is not a fake quick win, but it's a good thing that you can do, and you can put it in and say, "Look, we were able to do that" to buy time. It's go slow to go fast. And I think that if you don't do that, the chances of alignment—if you don't invest the time upfront, you're just on a very shaky foundation from day one, right? Is that a fair summary? So going in, you're taking that job day one. And I think that's beautiful what you do, Marshall, is that you can't take a job unless you have that, which is great, because I do think that there are others who get the job, but that alignment piece isn't there. Anyway, I'm in my own head now. So we're going to keep moving back to you. So practically, talk about meeting structures for alignment. How do you see that working in either your current organization or one that you've worked in the past, where when sales and marketing are aligned, you are meeting in this way?

Dave: I meet every other week with our CRO, once a month with the product lead, and once a month with CX. And then beneath me, my team—I have directors' levels reporting to me—so our directors meet every other week with sales, every other week with product, every other week with sales enablement, every other week with revenue ops. So the team at the functional level are meeting regularly, staying in touch. Then there's quarterly meetings we do. We call it a Product Marketing Listening Tour, where our product marketing head is out talking to a variety of sales reps at different market segments and getting information from them. Once every six months, we do what's called Demo Days, where the sales team gets together and they deliver the sales pitch to one another, and we listen in. I find those meetings always fascinating because you're hearing people tell the story that you helped create, right? But it's always delivered in a way that's different than what you anticipated. So you just learn from that. And then annually, of course, through a planning cycle, you're working with "What are the sales goals here? What are we trying to get done?" and together aligning around the strategy. So those are the regular meetings that we have at a tactical level that I think help ensure that alignment across all levels of the organization.

Drew: That's a lot of meetings.

Dave: You know, once every other week at the director level, I don't think that's that much.

Drew: And how do they loop you in on those? Because you cannot possibly be in all of those. And it's important that it's—and I love the fact that it's pushed down, right? It's not you. You have your peer-to-peer, but you've got them doing sort of peer-to-peer, and that feels like a really smart process. Lisa, what kind of frequency works for you? And to keep alignment?

Lisa: Well, one thing I have going for me in the current role—I'm the head of marketing and the head of product—so just check that box off, right? I do have similar cadence from a meeting perspective, in terms of marketing, product, and sales. The only thing I would say that's probably incremental to that is that every quarter, I do believe that there should be a mutual service level agreement between marketing and sales, that the "who's going to do what" and "what's everyone accountable and responsible for?" And so I do believe having that quarterly check-in to say, "Hey, we all agreed we were going to do these things this way and on these timelines. Does this still make sense? What have we learned about this this past quarter? Do we need to adjust it for the next quarter?" And that's not about a lead, although you could talk about any definitions within it. In some cases, it's about, yeah, you know, closing feedback loops. It's about, you know, how things are converting. It's about whether or not you've got enough flowing into the pipeline. It's holistic, but it is a meaningful service. That would be the one thing I would add to it. The other piece is, is I make it a point to join their weekly revenue forecast review calls, and make it a point to join those. And then, of course, I'd play a role in the quarterly QBRs, you know, the QBRs that sales leads. And so those are kind of the additions I would put there. When I was in an organization I didn't have product, Dave, I had a very similar cadence and expectation, and it went all the way down to the manager level, particularly between marketing and product, because we had such a challenge with misalignment. There the function—the product marketers used to be embedded in product, and they had become order takers, and so we had to kind of reset what that relationship would be. It was critical bringing all the way down to the manager levels. But again, every one of those meetings is worth having.

Drew: I love the—you know, you've heard service level agreements. SLAs for folks who don't use that acronym, heard that term a lot, particularly when it comes to say BDRs and SDRs, but I hadn't really seen it departmentally. SLAs for, you know, marketing to sales and sales to marketing. It makes a lot of sense. And the one thing we haven't really talked about is the importance of definitions. If we don't—if we have service level agreements and we don't agree with an opportunity, that's a problem and that you get this misalignment. Marshall, do you want to weigh in on that one?

Marshall: Yeah, real quick on the whole definitions thing. When I first started at OpenEye, I spent a good—the first good three months—working with the head of sales on definitions of success between marketing and sales and what they understood and what we understood. So that was important. The other thing I was going to add was, in addition to all the team meetings and individual leader meetings that Dave and Lisa have, having a common dashboard that marketing and sales are feeding in terms of pipeline and reporting that out to the CEO and the C-suite is critical. And making sure that you're both in agreement about what is displayed there, and you're both in support of it, and can both explain how both marketing and sales contribute to it, is really important. And I was working on that right before I left OpenEye—we were just launching that. It's really important for the rest of the leadership team to see that integration of marketing and sales and that collaboration and that you're both supporting.

Drew: Yeah, it reminds me, I know a number of CMOs who insist on jointly presenting sales and marketing as one thing when they present to the board, which makes sense. And sometimes the sales—they take turns. Of these are quarterly reports. They'll take turns who's presenting it, but there's none of this "These are marketing data" and "these are sales data." But I remember one story from one of our Huddles, who was first-time CMO, and went into the board and said, "Look at our fantastic marketing metrics, look at our MQLs and SQLs, look at how we're doing," and the board says, "So sales sucks." So you're basically—that was a lesson learned. So you don't need to make that mistake, because someone else did it and shared it here on CMO Huddle Studios, so jointly present your metrics and take shared responsibility. Okay, we're at the wrapping up point. You know, at the risk of repeating some of the things we said, let's try to find some final words of wisdom for CMOs when it comes to go-to-market alignment. And Marshall, let's go with you first.

Marshall: So what I will say is, when you step into a role as a CMO, whether it's a full-time role or whether you're a fractional CMO, you have to take the time to build those relationships with the head of sales, the head of product, the head of customer success, and agree on a joint go-to-market strategy with joint metrics that all of you are committed to and are going to support and report out on. It takes a lot of work to build those relationships to do it virtually, to do it in person when possible. That time, though, is going to be well spent, because down the road, the rest of the leadership team is going to see that you are having an impact, having that collaboration with sales, and they're also going to see hopefully higher outcomes in terms of revenue, and that should hopefully preserve your seat at the table long term. I know it doesn't always work out that way, but at least you've done as much as you can.

Drew: It's funny, as you were talking, I had this vision of the CMO setting up this meeting with product and customer success and marketing at 4 p.m. whatever the company time was, and saying, "Nobody's leaving the room till we have agreement," and whether it's a virtual room or in-person room, so I could see you can force this issue. Okay, Dave. Dave Bornmann, what's your final words of wisdom for CMOs, seeking alignment.

Dave: First of all, just echo everything that Marshall said, because relationships, for me, are the most important part of it. I also think there's this notion of having respect for each other's domain and really understanding the sales process. I think it's important, not only to CMO level, but to create an environment where your team really understands sales and understands how hard it is. I've worked in different past organizations where you'd have someone saying, "We're doing all this and we're handing over all these leads and sales isn't doing anything with them." Yeah, you might have leakage here and there around the edges, but that's not true. If we were handing them really good leads, they'd be taking those leads and they'd be selling and hitting their quota, and they'd be happy as can be. So when that's not happening, that's a problem. And I think just setting that tone for your organization so that everyone respects how hard the other side of the house—how hard their job is—you just build up that mutual respect that ultimately helps with the alignment.

Drew: It's so important, and it's one of the reasons why I love it if a CMO has actually come up through sales, or at least gone into sales experience. I'm a big fan of executive sponsorship programs where the CMO is responsible for businesses just for the same exact reason for accounts. Okay. Lisa, final words of wisdom.

Lisa: I think one of the smartest things, or at least lessons learned through the years, is that if you're not really quite sure how tightly aligned marketing is with sales and the perception of that relationship between the two functions, ask. One of the most valuable things that I do anytime I start with a new organization or new team is I do this anonymous perception survey where I ask both sales and marketing—every single member—a set of the same questions. And it's more along the lines of, you know, "What's marketing's understanding of the sales process? What do you—you know? How—what's sales understanding of the marketing process? What are your thoughts in terms of how we communicate with each other, how often we meet, what usually drives the meetings that we have? The metrics that matter. Do you feel like our metrics—you know, marketing and sales metrics are aligned. Why?" When they go through these questions, you can very quickly find out: is one of these teams living in denial? The other team wildly misaligned and unhappy with the way that that relationship plays out. The good news about taking that survey approach and simply asking those questions: one, you actually know where to dial in and address the alignment, but two, a year from now, you can actually do that same survey to see if you actually strengthened the relationship and improved alignment. And you know, if you don't, you might have members of your team that live in denial. "No, we're great. We get along really well. We work well together." "No, are you sure about that?" You know, that would be my advice. Go-to-market alignment—actually ask the questions. Seek to understand if you're really aligned.

Drew: I love that, and I have to say this is the first time I—you know, Dave and I worked together. He knows that I love to do employee surveys, but we never talked about this notion of the survey between marketing and sales and getting that alignment. That is brilliant, because now you know how big of a problem that you have, and you'll have a way—a benchmark to track against that you improve it. And if we do what we're talking about, which is joint ownership of it. It's not just a marketing to fix the relationship. It's on sales to fix the mark. Really, it's both and so that, I think, is really cool. Last thing is, just go on a sales call, folks, you'll get it. You'll—So, all right, thank you. Lisa, Dave, Marshall, you're all good sports. Thank you audience for staying with us.

 

To hear more conversations like this one and submit your questions while we're live, join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio. We stream to my LinkedIn profile—that's Drew Neisser—every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!