The Sales and Marketing Relationship: Why Most Teams Get It Wrong and How to Fix It with Freya Ward

Aside from content, but just the data that sales is getting.

So the s- the data that moves back and forward to help inform marketing at the front, uh, the, like, more at the front end of the funnel.

So not so much the sales enablement, but the content marketing's creating to bring leads and prospects into the business to pass through to sales.

We need that feedback loop as well, don't we? Because that's how we're building the brand and the messaging that ultimately leads to those people coming to the business.

So what would you say is the main sales signal to go back to marketing? So, you know, we often talk about reason for rejection, like the marketing team being acutely aware and working with sales, because if we can accumulate data on the w- the reason that sales are not going through and the thing that is causing people to, to stop, then we can start to address that.

Do you see that as being key? And i- is it being captured? Do you see it being captured, or is it, is it something that's kind of falling through [chuckles] the cracks within that feedback loop as well?

From the, the signal for marketing to pass over to sales or the signal from sales to pass back to marketing?

Sales to pass back to marketing from the view that when things are falling down on the sales side, so we need to look a little bit more at who's coming through in the messaging that is coming to sales in the first place.

What do you think are those main data points and signals, like the key things that we really, really do want sales to be gathering to go to marketing to try and address where things are falling through on that side?

I think where I see the most common cause of what I'd call lead leakage, which is this, this leakage of data that kind of just falls out the funnel and ends up in no man's land.

One of the key causes of that is either unidentified, so it's salespeople don't believe that that contact is ready to talk to them, or, um, they're unable to make connection with them through multiple channels, or they're getting kind of pushback to marketing, but without that justification and that reason.

So the first thing I would recommend to a business and for marketing to take control of, 'cause often this happens in my experience because sales are working in one CRM, marketing are working in another CRM or a marketing automation systems, whatever you wanna call them.

Take Salesforce and HubSpot by way of example, and the communication between the two platforms is great because, you know, leads hit a certain score, they trip over to sales, sales get notified.

Sales reject the lead, and then sometimes they just sit in this in between-ness space, and they maybe go back into the CRM system, the HubSpot system, and maybe go on a workflow or a nurture.

But no one is really taking ownership of that drop-off, and we look at the statistics, I think it's something like, uh, it's the 95/5 rule, so only 5% of your total addressable market is actually in market to buy at one given time.

So that's tiny in comparison.

You know, 95% of the audience that you are engaging are not ready to buy, and therefore, that is the strongest signal that they're not ready to talk to sales.

There's so much that's well in the market at the moment about the B2B buying journey changing and the introduction of AI and AI search and, uh, uh, GenAI enablement is meaning that research is being conducted for much longer and in a much more sophisticated way than ever before.

So with all of these different changes, I believe the biggest and ripest opportunity for marketing is to actually start tracking that in between, so that, that lead leakage, and then looking for those signals that you were talking of, Amy.

Often, sales aren't held accountable to a mandatory field within the CRM, which is if you are pushing this lead back to marketing, which of these 10 different reasons does it most resonate with the reason that you're pushing this lead back? So that could be ghosting.

Um, we call it ghosting at Headley.

It's basically they're nev- not talking to us.

They won't respond.

Um, if they have responded, maybe it's budget.

If they have responded, maybe they've gone with a competitor.