With less than 11% of women holding executive positions in Silicon Valley, it isn’t surprising that women feel pressured to model their leadership style on the masculine ‘norm’ present around them. However, a few years ago I read a book by Helena Morrissey titled It’s a Good Time to be a Girl and it completely changed my perspective.
Now I believe that women should find ways to be authentically themselves and find a leadership style that embraces the attributes that have made them a success. As a woman, I often ask myself – are we making room for the types of environments and conversations in business that pay homage to the female attributes and style of leadership, rather than just the male counterpart? And I encourage other women in business to consider the same question. We need to make sure we’re creating workplaces where young women know they can lead in the way that is most authentic to them.”
I realise now that differences in priorities between sales and marketing can often lead to misconceptions about what ‘true value’ means. In fact, B2B marketing and sales leaders must work together to build one unified department. We must collaboratively reinvent our roles to prove value and make a greater impact.
With effective sales and marketing collaboration, revenue increases faster and more efficiently. This is a fact: I’ve seen the results for myself. And we all want that. In the past, I’ve led teams working towards the same top-level goals as sales, while allowing campaigns, tactics and everyday activities to diverge. Often, this led to conflict and diluted everyone’s effectiveness.
I recently read Sangram Vajre and Eric Spett’s book, ABM is B2B. They point out that, in general, less than 1% of leads convert. I wish I had properly understood this statistic years ago: it clearly shows the need for marketers to walk alongside sales at every touchpoint in the buying journey and cycle. Selling is not the problem – but customers are struggling to buy.
As a marketer, I now recognise that we are in the business of change. We’re here simply to enable better and faster conversions. Marketers must help educate sales in how to move successfully from outbound to inbound and from push to pull. We have the expertise and tactics to give buyers what they want from their buying experience, creating authenticity and building on brand equity.
All of this means that I now focus my core strategies on smarketing enablement. It’s clear that I and the teams I lead must work with sales leaders to clearly define shared sales and marketing goals and processes. Trusted data and analytics have been critical in aligning us across the board. We must put learning and development programmes in place to grow our collective smarketing skills and measure success through clear, shared metrics.
My lesson learned: to be a successful and impactful leader, I must play a broader role than heading up marketing delivery. That role includes providing a strategic vision across sales and marketing to drive revenue, leading innovation, coaching and development.
Sounded great on paper. Our social/digital service complemented their core research offering, providing their clients with tangible social proof that their research services were adding to their clients bottom line. A win/win.
But this was not to be. The sales team was not trained in digital. Great at selling analyst reports because that’s what they knew. They didn’t understand our product well enough themselves to be able to sell it to their clients. Result? They avoided these conversations and sales never took off.
My mistake was the assumption that my target audience had a certain level of understanding about our service. I didn’t question this assumption. I didn’t dig deep. Had I asked the right questions at the outset, this problem would have been uncovered and fixed. By the time I realised my mistake, it was too late. I’d lost the audience that were key to success.
My leadership learning is that this never works – always always always push out to the wider team and get collective viewpoints on the issue or challenge. This generates better ideas, gets collective energy behind a problem and helps the sell through of the solution so much better.
This works for new product development, ad creative development, new ideas to increase customer acquisition and generating new ideas for content creation. The challenge is to find ways of collaborating that are genuinely useful and not decision making by committee. A couple of routes forward that work for me are: setting the hare running in a group situation. Everyone loves the challenge of coming up with better and better ideas but it’s hard with a blank piece of paper in front of you.
As a leader, be brave enough to come up with an OK idea that could solve the problem and then ask your team to improve it. Another idea would be to find time for ‘What if?’ conversations to try and rethink ways round a problem or improve marketing performance. The challenge with the team remote video working is to frame the ‘what if’ problem in a way that generates new ideas as it’s hard to have more conversational team chats on zoom. Another route for upward or horizontal peer management is to ask ‘what would you do if you were me?’ to help generate more insightful thinking around the challenge and help buy in. Once people are actively engaged rather than listening for the correct answer which they can choose to agree or disagree with – they are much more likely to be supportive.
