‘Only half of marketing works’ I’ve often heard this said in jest as a mis quotation of John Wanamaker’s famous line: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In our world, it’s our responsibility to ensure this isn’t true, especially when collaborating with our sales teams.
When it comes to campaigns, sales often default to webinars and one-pagers – which can be time-consuming and sometimes ineffective. Our role is to create quick, testable formats that can be refined on the fly. Think web pages instead of PDFs and on-demand video or social media content instead of webinars – they can be monitored, tested, and tweaked. But to make this happen, we need trust and alignment between marketing and sales, starting with leadership.
Here are five tips to get you started:
- Align on Goals: First and foremost, understand what matters to your sales team and ensure you’re on the same page. Typically, this means focusing on pipeline and win rates. While metrics like leads and campaign performance are great for us marketers, when talking to sales, stick to pipeline value, coverage, win rates, and closed revenue. These are the numbers that matter to them and the business.
- Know the Audience: Work with your sales team to create and agree on personas, category entry points, and customer challenges. Knowing your audience inside out helps you both understand what success looks like and how to achieve it. Lean into the knowledge your sales team already holds. They’re on the front line, speaking to prospects and customers every day. They know what questions are being asked, what objections are raised, and what ultimately nudges someone towards a decision. Don’t use marketing terminology like “category entry points”, keep it simple. In workshops, ask straightforward questions: What triggers the buyer to start looking? What problem are they trying to solve? What’s going on in their world when they speak to us?
- Communicate and Collaborate: Planning together is key. Align your strategies and understand how much pipeline is needed to hit sales targets. Be clear on where this pipeline will come from and what’s needed to achieve it. Also, get to know the topics that interest your customers. Often, this means turning what the seller wants to sell into something the buyer wants to buy. Because sales typically speak to customers later in the buying process they don’t always know or consider what the earlier part of the journey looks like. Our role is to explore this together and make sure we are relevant and delivering value throughout.
- Fail Fast: Marketing needs to lead on failing fast. One of my previous sales directors once said, “The only thing you can do wrong is do nothing.” What they meant was, try, learn, tweak, adapt, and optimize. With AI, this is becoming easier and quicker. Lead the way in testing and refining, but make sure to communicate the process and learnings to your sales team.
- Look Beyond Leads: Marketing is more than just generating leads – sounds obvious but many sales teams still see marketing as simply a lead machine (better than just the coloring in department I guess) . We now take opportunities to the 20% close stage before bringing in a seller. This helps improve win rates, adds value to prospects, and ensures sales steps in at the right time. We then create marketing content for the whole sales process, not just the lead process. This isn’t just product collateral; it’s value-add research that educates prospects and shapes their buying journey. It’s important to work alongside sales to optimize the customer experience during the buying cycle. Don’t leave it all to sales – marketing can offer huge value here by considering buyer enablement as well as sales enablement.
By aligning goals, knowing your audience, communicating, failing fast, and looking beyond leads, you can create a powerful partnership with your sales team that drives growth.
Alex is taking part in The Great AI Debate: Is AI Killing B2B Marketing? at B2B Ignite on 2 July 2025, London. To save 20% on your ticket use discount code ALEXBACON20 when you register at b2bignite.net.
