Can You Recover From Losing Trust With Sales? How “Black Box” Technology Isolates Marketing From Sales.

I’ve been talking to a lot of go-to-market leaders lately, and one quote has haunted me, and this is not a Halloween pun or joke, knowing that I recorded this shortly after Halloween, but it was: 

“I don’t ever want sales to ask where these accounts came from.”

If sales is asking us where an account came from and we can’t answer that with the technology we’re using, then we’re screwed. If sales doesn’t trust you, it’s not a good place to be. And that’s one thing at Demandbase we pride ourselves on. When we talk about flexibility or transparency, it’s making sure that we work for your business and that we understand your business and empower you to build trust between sales and marketing.

ONE, just one, person on your team that loses trust brings down the overall trust rating for the entire team by 32 percentile points.

That is mind-boggling. The study included over 60,000 employees and just one person losing trust can sink the entire team. Make sure that any technology you’re using, anything that you’re doing, that you can actually back it up, have that conversation, build trust and alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success and that you don’t put everything in a black box. We can’t build trust without transparency and visibility. No amount of artificial intelligence will close that gap. 

Four key takeaways jump out to me after hundreds of conversations and workshops helping organizations with their ideal customer profiles (ICP) and target account selection:

• Using the term ABM evokes us vs. them
• Marketing can help lead or facilitate account selection, but sales must own the list
• There is no shortcut or easy button to sales and marketing alignment
• Marketers live and die by their relationship and trust with sales

Using the term ABM evokes us vs. them

Account-Based Marketing is and has always been too narrow. Marketing alone will not be successful with account-based. This is why many use Account-Based Experience (ABX) or Account-Based Strategy (ABS). Acronym soup, but it is important to have inclusive conversations from the beginning to build more trust and alignment between all of the teams required to make account-based efforts successful.

Marketing can help lead or facilitate account selection, but sales must own the list

Sales is on the hook for pipeline and revenue. Many organizations are finding shared metrics of success to better align sales, marketing and customer success by the nature of how success is defined. It’s great when an account-based leader pulls together the cross-functional team and champions the initiative, but sales still owns the list once it is created and agreed upon. Sales can’t question the merit or validity of the target accounts and when they do, we should be equipped to have that conversation. Friendly challenge: if you use account-based technology, find an account that shouldn’t be on the list and discover why it is on the target account list. If you can’t answer that, an uncomfortable situation could be looming. Hint: “AI did it” is not a sufficient response.

There is no shortcut or easy button to sales and marketing alignment

The most aligned organizations have regular meetings and communication with each other and similar measures of success. Marketing isn’t successful without sales. Sales isn’t successful without marketing. While demand generation led to a rise of marketing-influenced and -sourced metrics, account-based efforts should be viewed differently as sales and marketing should work together throughout the entire buying process. I and many other marketers at Demandbase join plenty of sales calls to talk shop and help move deals forward. Hopefully you are too.

Marketers live and die by their relationship and trust with sales

Like any personal or professional relationship, lost trust is difficult to recover from. Our professional lives are made up of thousands of personal relationships and the same relationship framework applies. Open lines of communication and honesty throughout sales, marketing, and customer success collaboration builds stronger trust and alignment that usually results in better outcomes. No matter how great the next thingamabob you add to your tech stack is, it should enable not inhibit you to have more transparent communication with your colleagues about why various actions are made. Jodi Lebow, marketing leader at Hexagon, says it best “I don’t ever want sales to say ‘who picked these accounts?’”

If you’re relying on a black box in your technology stack that obscures decision-making, it may be time to smash it for good.