B2B Marketing Leader
Building the Buy-In
A growth system can be properly built and still go nowhere. Alignment is what turns it into something that actually works.
Get the team in the same orbit
Trust me when I say, EVERYONE has an opinion on how and what marketing should do. And for the most part, marketing teams do their best to oblige. However, marketing has the obligation to think both short and long term and take a step back to consider everyone's functional goals, each customer touchpoint, and how together we can develop a system of revenue growth.
That holistic view, and all those inputs, needs a system to set priority rather than a set of good intentions. But a system built alone gets adopted alone. The parts that run through sales, product, and account management have to be built with them, or they stay marketing's idea forever.
Leading with the system loses the room
You bring your beautiful new marketing system to everyone with the enthusiasm of someone who just solved something BIG. *Polite nods*. Immediately following your big meeting, BDRs go right back to the same old broken playbooks they've always run, sales goes back to that horrifically off-brand sales deck...you get the idea.
Nobody disagreed. So what gives?
Maybe they just weren't listening. The instinct is to communicate it again. Another two-hour alignment meeting, 5 new CRM fields that will eternally be unfilled, a dashboard nobody will open except for you. But they understood you the first time. The plan just didn't clear the bar.
Maybe it solves a problem they don't have. The one keeping them up is somewhere else.
Maybe it's more work before it's less work, and the extra falls on them.
Maybe the value is real but nobody tied it to what they're measured on.
Get close before you prescribe
Which means starting somewhere other than your plan. Be genuinely curious, and be transparent in return.
PRODUCT
See what they're building toward, and what accounts already using it are saying.
BDR
Walk through responses and rejections, and verify whether your ICP you've been targeting is actually the ICP.
SALES
Ride along on calls and hear the objections first-hand and see what's slowing them down.
ACCOUNT MGMT
Get to the root of churn. Which marketing promises come back at renewal.
Every function has a version of who the customer is. All of them are partial. The shared one is the thing worth building toward.
Try building it with them
The customer journey is my favorite place to start, because nobody owns all of it. Get product, sales, and the BDRs in a room and map it together. You find out fast that stage names mean different things to different people.
People leave with a piece of it that's theirs, which is most of what adoption is. And they leave understanding marketing is there to make their number easier.
Then stop deciding on feel
I worked with a sales team who truly believed trade shows were the key to their pipeline. Then we looked at the data of what those leads actually did after the badge scan, and the answer was not much, for a lot of time and investment.
Nobody had to be talked out of anything. We looked at it together and the enthusiasm for trade shows found somewhere better to go.
