The Symptoms of the B2B Selling Sickness

At most B2B companies, the marketing/sales relationship has taken a wrong turn. 

Sellers are taking marketing into their own hands. 

They’re emailing prospects, investing heavily in third-party intent platforms like 6Sense, and generally doing their own messaging and outreach. 

And they’re not using Marketing’s expensively produced content. 

The fact that they’re ignoring most MQLs while sourcing their own leads should tell you something is drastically wrong. 

And something is drastically wrong. We saw a client absolutely crush its marketing goals — increasing traffic to its website and content by 70%, overachieving ambitious pipeline goals by 42%. 

But revenue didn’t follow.

Because the B2B go-to-market playbook — what worked before — no longer matches the reality of how customers buy. 

You can see the results of this in the growing lack of trust between sales and marketing teams. And you can see it when most marketing teams fail to deliver revenue anywhere near what they should be contributing (and getting credit for). 

You can see it in falling CMO tenure. 

Breaking this cycle isn’t going to be easy but it’s absolutely worth it. 

Companies that steer Sales and Marketing in the same direction — both a herculean task in itself and a symptom of doing a lot of other things right — are crushing their targets.

Hubspot research shows that B2B brands with aligned sales and marketing teams: 

• Deliver 20% annual revenue growth as opposed to a 4% decline in non-aligned companies
• Have 38% higher win rates
• Enjoy 14% faster sales cycles

And Forrester adds 27% higher margins to this growth. 

It’s a profit windfall. 

So why are most marketers so stuck — and how can we get unstuck? We have thoughts. 

Fatigue, a dry hacking cough and shit-talk

When the B2B sales and marketing relationship is unwell, you’ll see some very clear symptoms. Think: 

• Sales reps ignore up to 70% of sales leads provided by marketing — often throwing them out without even trying to qualify them because they’ve learned it’s a waste of their time. And they’re not saying nice things about Marketing. 
• 60-70% of your content is never used because Sales doesn’t see the relevance. We don’t think this is usually the content’s fault. Sales just doesn’t have the context, maybe because they’re too busy running their own rogue marketing efforts … 
• 80% of marketing leads die in the funnel. 
• And the biggest symptom: Marketing isn’t generating at least a third of company revenue. 

This is basically everyone: Fewer than 10% of companies think their sales and marketing teams are strongly aligned. 

But these symptoms actually indicate a larger problem: Marketing and Sales are operating on an outdated model that assumes sellers have a lot more influence over the buying process than they do — when in reality, buyers have taken the power into their own hands. 

And that’s if Sales even gets to talk to a buyer. Sales/prospect interactions are the tip of a very large iceberg these days. By the time a buyer signals buying intent, they’ve done all kinds of research and formed their own opinions. 

LinkedIn’s research shows only 5% of B2B buyers are actively in the market at any time. Right now, most companies are killing themselves fighting over that 5%. They’re hemorrhaging money in a street fight with other vendors. 

And they’re doing it when the fight’s already over because the buyers have mostly made up their minds. 

Trying to earn buyers at the very last minute when they’re no longer convince-able is like showing up to the Olympics without having trained. You can kill yourself practicing that week but it’s nothing without all all the work that comes before.

In this case, the work is talking to prospects before they’re actively in the buying stage. People buy from the companies they spend time with, and you have to earn the opportunity to talk to them when it’s go-time by investing in brand-building activities that deliver no immediate payoff. 

Brands that don’t do this are often jumping on any sign of interest from a so-called buyer — even if all that person was trying to do was read “3 ways to improve your data strategy” after they got bonked over the head with it — and calling it a lead. 

When Marketing hands over a ‘lead’ like this to Sales, we annoy prospects and sellers alike. No one wants to get harassed to buy an expensive product they heard about five seconds ago. We haven’t earned the right to talk to them yet. 

It’s not that marketing content to people in the early stages of a potential buying journey is a bad move; in fact, we recommend it. It’s just that the lead is far from ready. It needs time, love and patience from marketers. 

Tough medicine 

While it’s nearly impossible to change minds once buyers are at the moment of buying, there are lots of things marketers can influence, including whether your sales team gets the chance to talk to buyers at all. 

You can earn that chance by providing useful and compelling content for every stage of a buying journey, starting with problem awareness. 

Or maybe before that, making them aware there is a problem or missed opportunity in the first place.

And Sales, on its side, needs to let Marketing lead on messaging — and embrace data. 

An ideal journey will look more like: 

• A prospect — more like a zygote at this stage — realizes they want to do something better or more efficiently
• They go to Google seeking some insight and Bam! your content shows up to help them identify the contours of the problem
• Marketing spots some signals indicating more interest and starts to target mid-funnel content at the zygote-turned-fetus, plus others in the buying committee 
• And you nurture them into further consideration until … 
• Contractions get closer and it’s time to turn them over to sellers 
• … Who know exactly what kind of care and messaging you’ve already provided and can deliver a pitch that builds on it

But all this takes trust between Marketing and Sales — and a commitment from your company to invest in the long-term stuff that doesn’t produce MQLs right away. 

We’re not saying it’s easy. Three-quarters of CMOs are under pressure to show ROI faster, and nearly half face pressure to prove marketing will drive long-term growth. 

Getting better will take a fundamental restructuring of how Marketing and Sales operate. Because right now, we treat our partnership like it’s a relay race, except Marketing is running toward the wrong post and Sales is re-running the track from the beginning. 

A better metaphor might be a football team (that’s ‘soccer’ for you Yanks) where you have each position running in coordinated actions, and a multi-talented striker who can do it all. 

It’s also gonna take completely rethinking our KPIs to reflect the new reality of how buyers operate. Right now, they incentivize only short-term lead gen when they need to do a lot more long-term activation. 

And they need to get serious about lead-scoring so sellers know what play they’re walking into when they call. 

And companies need to stop spending entirely too much effort on disappointing attribution initiatives that are more about who gets the credit for a sale than how to invest marketing dollars wisely. 

It’s early days, but some companies are thinking about collapsing sales and marketing teams under one roof, with one shared set of goals. The cool kids are calling it RevOps. Gartner explains RevOps isn’t so much a function as a better way to align the organization. 

What’s next 

B2B buying has changed. Sales and Marketing have to change, too. 

Breaking silos is always hard work but operating the way we are now — going after the wrong things and wasting effort — is also hard. We need to evolve the B2B go-to-market playbook to reflect how prospects move today: with lots of autonomy. 

Influence can still absolutely happen, but it has to be built on trust, not short-term tactics that annoy buyers. Think brand activation and nurturing. 

And we need to evolve so Sales and Marketing work together, doing what each does best. That might mean revisiting — or instating — service-level agreements, but also updating KPIs so they incentivize wise choices over vanity metrics like number of MQLs. 

If you’re up for the challenge, our new workbook lays out how to do the foundational work of aligning sales and marketing teams, setting new KPIs, nailing targeting, and auditing your marketing ops. 

Ready to see a Velocity blueprint in all its glory? Follow this link to download your free copy of The Big, Beautiful, B2B Blueprint now.