Sales-Driven Marketing: The Key to Revitalising Underperforming Sales Teams

It’s 9 AM, and you’ve been sitting at your desk, looking at the numbers. The sales targets have been missed – again. The energy in the office has felt heavy, your team has looked deflated, and you’ve been wondering what’s gone wrong. You’ve known your team is capable, but something hasn’t been clicking. The leads marketing has been sending haven’t converted, and frustration has mounted on both sides. The disconnect between marketing and sales has become the elephant in the room.

If you’ve been leading an underperforming team, this scenario likely sounds familiar. The good news? You can fix it. The solution has been lying in sales-driven marketing, where sales has taken the lead in shaping strategy, aligning efforts with marketing, and ensuring that both teams have worked toward a common goal: turning leads into conversions.

The Disconnect: When MQLs Haven’t Become SQLs

Let’s walk through a typical day. Your team has received a fresh batch of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from marketing. These prospects have engaged with content – maybe they’ve downloaded a white paper or registered for a webinar. But when your sales reps have called, the conversation has fallen flat. These leads haven’t been ready for a sales conversation. They’ve been interested, but not enough to buy yet. And your sales team, feeling deflated, has spent hours chasing unqualified leads.

This disconnect has occurred when sales and marketing haven’t aligned on what makes a lead ready for conversion. As Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling, has said: “The key to effective selling is not in pushing products, but in understanding customer problems.” Without understanding what truly qualifies a lead as sales-ready, your team has wasted precious time on MQLs that haven’t converted to SQLs.

How to Define Lead Qualification for Better Alignment

You might start by bringing both sales and marketing teams together to define shared lead qualification criteria. It would help to avoid automatically passing leads to sales just because they’ve downloaded a white paper. Instead, you could agree on engagement metrics such as multiple site visits, demo requests, or product page views that indicate true buying intent.

By creating this shared definition, you’d likely see an improvement in how leads are handed off to sales. Your team could then spend more time on conversations with genuinely interested prospects.

Temptation to Create Separate Resources: Avoiding the Pitfall

But even as things start to improve, you might notice a familiar challenge arising. Your top rep might express frustration with the marketing materials, saying, “We’ve started making our own follow-up documents because what marketing gives us doesn’t fit what we need.” It’s tempting for sales teams to create their own resources, but this could lead to inconsistent messaging that misaligns with the broader strategy.

If sales has started creating their own resources, you’d want to step in to prevent the risk of mixed messaging, which could confuse customers and weaken the brand’s positioning.

Preventing Sales from Going Rogue with Their Own Resources

At times, sales teams might feel tempted to create their own follow-up materials, especially when they believe marketing’s resources don’t quite meet their needs. While this can seem helpful in the short term, it risks creating inconsistent messaging and misalignment with the overall strategy.

To avoid this, you might consider organising a collaborative content session. In this meeting, sales and marketing could co-create materials that meet the specific needs of sales conversations while staying true to the brand’s positioning. This approach ensures both teams are on the same page and working toward the same goals.

Taking the Lead: Sales Driving Marketing Strategy

A few months later, during a strategy meeting, sales might begin to lead the conversation. Your sales team could share insights into customer pain points and objections they’ve encountered during calls. However, as you review the marketing materials, you might notice that the creative assets don’t fully align with these insights.

Your top rep might say, "We’ve needed messaging that reflects the objections we’re hearing in our conversations.” It’s a common scenario where sales feels they have a better understanding of what resonates with customers, while marketing is protective of the brand messaging.

Use Feedback Loops to Align Sales and Marketing Messaging

Sales reps are often on the front lines, engaging with customers and learning what resonates and what doesn’t. This can lead to a tension between sales and marketing, as sales might feel they know best, while marketing wants to protect the integrity of the brand’s messaging.

You could establish a feedback loop where sales shares real-time insights with marketing about what’s working in conversations. In turn, marketing would tweak the messaging based on this feedback, ensuring that what’s being shared by sales remains relevant and effective, while also maintaining consistency with the overall brand.

Empowering Your Team: Bridging the Sales Enablement Gap

One afternoon, a sales rep might approach you and say, “We’ve been getting great leads, but we need better materials to close.” It would become clear that, despite receiving qualified leads, the sales team hasn’t been equipped with the right resources – such as objection-handling scripts, case studies, or follow-up email templates.

If this has happened, it’s a sign that your team needs better sales enablement.

Building a Sales Playbook to Empower Your Team

Your sales team might be getting high-quality leads, but if they aren’t equipped with the right tools, they won’t be able to close effectively. This could include objection-handling scripts, follow-up email templates, and case studies that address specific concerns raised by prospects.

Developing a sales playbook in collaboration with marketing would give your team everything they need to confidently guide prospects through the sales cycle. By doing so, you’d empower your sales reps with the resources necessary to turn more leads into customers.

Creative Input: Making the Strategy Come Alive

During a review of marketing’s creative content – whether it’s videos, email templates, or social posts – you might realise that something is missing. While the content looks polished, it hasn’t fully captured the realities of the sales process.

Your sales team could have valuable insights and stories from their interactions with customers, and bringing these into the creative process early would likely make the strategy more engaging and effective.

Bringing Sales Insights into the Creative Process

Your marketing team likely produces high-quality creative content – videos, email templates, and social media posts – but if these assets don’t reflect the reality of sales conversations, they may not be as effective as they could be.

You could encourage creative brainstorming sessions that involve both sales and marketing teams. Sales could contribute insights and stories from their interactions with customers, which marketing could then use to create more relevant and engaging campaigns. This collaborative approach would ensure that creative content resonates more deeply with prospects and moves them further along the sales funnel.

Data-Driven Decision Making: The Insights That Drive Conversions

With the playbook in place, you might begin to notice trends in your CRM data. For instance, leads that interact with product-related content might be converting at a higher rate, but you could identify bottlenecks at the decision-making stage.

This could be a great opportunity to leverage data and automation to improve the follow-up process.

Using Data and Automation to Refine Follow-Ups

If you’ve noticed patterns in your CRM data – such as certain types of content driving higher conversion rates – you could use this information to improve how your sales and marketing teams approach follow-ups. Bottlenecks at the decision stage could be a sign that more personalised, timely engagement is needed.

You might implement CRM and marketing automation to trigger follow-up emails or sales alerts when a prospect takes specific actions, such as visiting a pricing page or interacting with product-related content. This would keep prospects engaged and ensure they move steadily through the funnel.

Time to Act: Your Team’s Turnaround Has Started Now

If you’ve made progress aligning sales and marketing, you might feel there’s still more to be done. Optimising alignment is an ongoing process, and it would be wise to continually assess your strategy.

Conduct Regular Audits to Keep Sales and Marketing Aligned

While you may have made significant strides in aligning your sales and marketing teams, it’s essential to keep fine-tuning the process. Regular assessments of your strategy will help maintain alignment and identify areas for further improvement.

Consider scheduling a sales and marketing alignment audit. This would allow you to pinpoint any gaps in communication or strategy and ensure that both teams are working efficiently toward shared goals.

The Power of Sales-Driven Marketing

Your journey as a Sales Director has likely been full of challenges, but by taking control of the marketing strategy, you’ve turned things around. The days of chasing unqualified leads have been left behind. Your team has aligned, been equipped, and has been ready to close deals with confidence. The next time those quarterly targets come up, you won’t just be hopeful – you’ll be ready.

Ready to take the next step? You could book a complimentary sales and marketing alignment audit with Adored Brands today, and let’s ensure that your sales team has the tools and alignment they need to succeed.