Closing the Gap Between the CRO and the CMO

Priscilla McKinney:

Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and mama bird over here with you as always. And today I'm going to talk about something that kind of drives me crazy. It's the gap between that CMO and the CRO. Am I right? Why do these two leaders keep fighting? Why can't sales and marketing get along?

And the answer is actually a little more straightforward than you think. And it starts with how companies set the roles up, honestly, very often in a way that is going to make them fail right from day one. So we're going to talk a little bit about bonuses, about lead qualification, and the marketing qualified lead versus the sales qualified lead conundrum... slash disaster, and what actually needs to change if you want these two departments to stop pointing fingers and start generating revenue together.

So let's get into it. The classic fight between sales and marketing is really about lead quality versus lead quantity. Really, if you think about it, that's where we end up. And that's what those departments are arguing about.

But we need to step back and examine the CMO and the CR role as roles independently. So here's what I see happening in most enterprise situations. The CMO's bonus is tied to brand trackers, maybe certain KPIs and certain kinds of marketing moves. And then the CRO's bonuses, well, those are tied to actual revenue.

And to me, that is where things fall apart. Why should two people who should be sharing a goal and an outcome, be getting bonuses for different things. I do think that's a bit weird, but it has been like that for a very long time and I continue to see it. And that ultimately is a foundation that will not work because the CMO is constantly working to make sure the brand tracker looks amazing or that they are hitting specific numbers, but they're working on different numbers.

So the CMO and the CRO sometimes, even though oftentimes they are great people, they're set up by the company, maybe even not intentionally, so that they don't really work together. my gosh, seriously? Pause.

The CMO and the CRO, often they're great people, but they've been set up by the company in a way, maybe not intentionally, that's just not going to work. They don't share a goal and that really has to happen. But the classic fight comes down to their departments. It's salespeople always pointing at marketing people saying, hey, these leads stink. And marketing people pointing at salespeople saying, hey, we gave you tons of leads and you never picked up the phone.

And I guess what we have to ask is what is the root of that disconnect? There's something even more foundational going on that people seem to not want to address, and I think it's about money. It's about the numbers behind money, and I find that fascinating because in America we are completely obsessed with money. To be honest, we're a bit of a money hungry culture, and yet when you pull back that layer for a minute, it can actually be hard in that work setting for people to talk about numbers and money. It's hard for them to talk about real data as it connects to real revenue.

And I think that the issue there is that people often have money concept problems. It's great when it's theoretical, but when it comes to lifetime value, churn rate, and actual cost, people are like, oh, well I don't want to talk about numbers and money. And I'm like, wait, no, that's actually what we're here for. So my thought is that when you're interviewing people as the CMO and the CRO, ask them about money. Ask them to talk about it, watch them.

Do they hem and haw or do they get right to the point and say, oh, well that should cost this and I'd be okay with this and I'd be okay with this benchmark. And what about the return from this investment? And it's not just the CMO and the CRO, but any of the salespeople and anyone who is doing biz dev, kudos to them if they can also read a P and L and really understand what the business is there for. Because we're missing that foundational ability to really talk about money and talk about numbers in the vernacular.

And when we get into marketing, we've got the CMO and the CRO there talking. Of course there's going to be a tug of war, but let me be optimistic for a second. What does it actually look like when this relationship works? Let's talk about that positive side. What people miss is that when the CRO and the CMO collaborate, one of my favorite words, then they're both working toward that North Star, which I think is revenue growth, and they're no longer being fixated on marketing metrics.

They're not looking at sales activity only. They're not just looking at the results, but at the revenue. And even when they want to collaborate, there is a little bit of a tactical nightmare that keeps tripping them up, and it all comes down to what we call a lead. So here's what happens. Marketing sends over what they consider to be a marketing qualified lead.

It fits the client profile, the target market, right? Someone was also interested, so there was some engagement, and then they send it over to sales. And sales ends up saying it's a dud, right? Or they're not interested in pursuing it. So here's what happens.

Marketing sends over what they consider to be a marketing qualified lead. Someone fit the ideal client buyer, was part of the target audience, and then they showed engagement. They were interested in something that was offered up and it gets sent to sales. And sales looks at it and says, what? This isn't even a good lead and they're not interested really in even pursuing it.

And if that is what is happening at the very beginning, then we need to attack the problem from the very beginning. If marketing thought that that was a marketing qualified lead, then instead of getting more of them, try to solve the problem, not by a numbers game, but by a quality game. Ask the people in sales, what does a marketing qualified lead look like so that you can convert it into a sales qualified lead. What does it mean to you to have someone who showed interest and someone who's connected to the brand, the product, or the service, come into your inbox?

Into your tasks, into your day to day activity, and then we can talk about how marketing could put that lead maybe through a rubric or some kind of framework to help with the lead sales qualification. So if marketing took more of the marketing qualified lead and the sales qualified lead approach and brought something better to the salesperson, then we could fix this issue. But the problem is there is a lot of yelling back and forth and not a whole lot of coming to the table and saying, hey guys, let's start over. What does an ideal client look like to you?

And one other fundamental disconnect in that is timing. Sales reps often want to be the first person to make that contact. They get excited and they say, okay, I'm going to grab this one and I'm going to move it along pretty quickly. But if there hasn't been a conversation before, marketing might not have considered timing of things like the marketing qualified lead might have been someone browsing as opposed to, hey, I want someone to call me.

Does that make sense? So that's a timing issue. And when there's a disconnect there, if I say, oh, I'm kind of interested in retiring to Portugal and I'd like a little bit of info and I get three phone calls in the next three hours from people wanting to talk with me about when I'm ready to leave without anybody realizing that I'm too young to retire right now. Then there's a disconnect in the timing, so I hope that example makes some sense.

So we might need to have some conversations about some nurturing sequences and consider how to provide this person with a few things they need before they actually get sent into the sales department. But if I raised my proverbial hand and said, you know, I'd like to schedule that demo, or I would consider a pilot or let me see that pricing. Those are very different intent types. That's different type of engagement.

Those are what I would call hand raising gestures, right? And so then marketing and sales can get more in alignment once they understand that piece of timing. So we've talked about all these problems, misaligned bonuses, inability to talk through money, disagreements over lead quality and timing issues. And you're probably thinking, oh my gosh, Priscilla, this sounds like a disaster. How do we fix it?

Well, I'm glad you've asked. I've written a few notes and I'd like to share them with you. So let me give you a framework that will help you come back to your marketing and sales teams and say, hey, what's going on here? If something is wrong, ask yourself these questions and ask them in this order. Because often I see people out there taking the right marketing actions, but they're in the wrong order, and that is causing problems.

So I give you my framework. I've talked about it a lot. If you listen to this podcast, it's called SOAR. Of course, it sounds great because we're birds and we're the peeps at Little Bird Marketing. But SOAR stands for S strategy, O organization, A accountability, and R repeatability.

So let's start at the beginning. When we start, we get a strategy, and that is so key. Strategy doesn't mean the marketing department goes off and creates a strategy. That would be the problem. Strategy does not mean that the marketing department goes off and creates a strategy.

Strategy means we bring all the stakeholders into the room and discuss the goals. Too often salespeople get left out of that marketing strategy meeting, even though they're the ones taking the final steps with the ideal customer. They're the ones who are talking to the customers all day long, and we need to hear what this person has to say. In fact, one of the first questions I often ask a salesperson is, hey, think back to that last time you were talking with that great client.

It was an ideal sales moment, but when they spoke up and they said, oh. What was the next thing that came out of their mouth? What was the thing that was frustrating that person? What was keeping them up on Sunday night? What was the pain they were in?

I want to get really clear about that. And really only the salespeople know the answer to that, and that to me is where strategy starts. Now, that doesn't mean you have to hear from the salespeople all the time. Once you establish the audience and you understand their pains and their challenges, their frustrations, their dreams, their aspirations, and all those kinds of things, really, unless you change your service or a pricing approach or something very significant happens in the market, you do not have to return to your persona for anything really, more than a light refresh here and there.

But for example, I'll give you some caution here, is that when AI hit the mainstream, I really think a lot of companies needed to go back and refresh their personas because those personas now have very different frustrations. They have very different days, they have very different problems, and some of them are pretty monumental, right? I mean, think about it. Even when COVID hit, we had to go back and revise our personas because corporately everybody was dealing with different issues. But for the most part, your ideal client persona does not really change significantly.

This isn't a weekly, quarterly, or yearly meeting really. Now, you probably should check in with your team if they are referring to your personas on that cadence, but personas when done very well, they should really last a very long time. For years and years, I have served the same ideal client persona. I call her C Suite Stacey. I know her.

I know how she thinks. I know what's wrong in her life. I know how she feels about it, and I know what she's trying to accomplish. I know why she stays up late on Sunday night and why she has occasional freakouts. Right? And I know those things that she says right after ugh.

And those are the things I'm trying to solve, and those are the things I'm building my marketing messages around. And those are the things I'm talking to my team about. Because if we can be successful talking to those things and providing a solution that is tied to revenue, okay, let's talk about O. Now O stands for organization.

And what that means is what exactly is getting done? What's the checklist? Let's try and do this the same way every time. Let's have a template. And part of that template is also, by the way, who is responsible for it and when, and I don't care what system you use.

Trello, Monday, whatever, but I want to know who is doing this task and not one of those like, oh, who had that idea in a meeting, but no organizing it. What did we do when we came out of that meeting? Do we know precisely when this is going to get done and what it looks like if it were done and done well? A is for accountability because no matter what you do to organize things, and no matter how good your strategy is, three minutes or three hours or three days or three months later, someone says, oh, I have a great idea.

Let's change the marketing message to this, or, let's use this video, or let's go to such and such conference. I mean, everybody's going to it, and you're just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What we need to do is go back and say, does it hold in alignment with our S with our strategy, does it hold in alignment with O our organization and organizing it means not just are we able to write the checklist and get it done and assign it to somebody, but that also means organization that you need to ensure that person that it's assigned to has the bandwidth. Do they have the time?

Do they have the resources? Honestly, do they have the skills? So in that A portion, the accountability, what I'm doing is really giving companies a permission slip to finally say no to some marketing ideas. If it does not fit your strategy, if it cannot be organized, then we're not going to do it. And so in this A portion, what I'm really doing is giving companies a permission slip to say no to some marketing things.

And that is really powerful. If it does not fit into your strategy S, if you cannot seem to organize it O, then A, we're not doing it right and we can say no to that so that we can focus on better things. When we've done S and O and A, then we can move on to the R. And the R is repeatability. What did we try to measure?

And if we wanted to double down on something that really went well, how can we do that? What were those metrics we need to review? We need to know what actually worked, and then we'll come back around and either double down on something or we're going to quit doing something that did not work. So that's the framework that I find is really important. Now, the salesperson may only be involved in the S and the strategy portion, and then they give marketing that valuable piece of information about that ideal client, buyer, and hopefully a little information about what would help convert the sale and what is a meaningful conversation that is needed in order to get revenue going, and then marketing takes that and runs the complete SOAR process.

It's so key because if we were all in agreement at the very beginning about our audience and what their problems were, then it's very hard for someone to come back later and complain about the lead quality. So S is where I think a lot of people need to be brought in, but they don't need to really go any further once we get that S for strategy dialed in. Once you move on to the OAR, I really don't care what kind of technology you use. I use HubSpot.

I'm a platinum HubSpot shop. Other people use a lot of different programs, and I don't care what CRM you use or if it's an Excel spreadsheet. I mean, God help you if it's an Excel spreadsheet. Let's just say it is. Everything after that is just fluff if we haven't agreed on who our audience is and why we are of undeniable value to them.

Now, SOAR gives you the tactical framework, but there's something deeper that happens for this to work. You need real collaboration. And if you've listened to this podcast, you know I love talking about that. I wrote a book called Collaboration is a New Competition, and I'm telling you, this is not the fake kind of collaboration where people sit in the same room that is called geography. The real collaboration requires three things.

First of all, everybody involved in the collaboration has to have something to win and something to lose. So we have to ask questions like, if the CMO and the CRO do this, what will they gain? What will they lose? Is it bonuses? Is it next year's budget?

Now I'm a cultural anthropologist, and I'm telling you, humans operate the same way all the time. If we look at the incentive, we will see the behavior. You've heard of that. And so if the CMO and CRO are incented differently, you're going to see different behavior. So the CEO needs to address that.

They need to really set this up for a win. The second thing in collaboration that is required is that you need transparency. Everybody involved has to be willing to show their cards. And so for the CMO and CRO to not be at odds, they need to be people who are going to be willing to share those cards and I will just add an interesting caveat here. Perhaps the CFO needs to be in this conversation because sometimes it is the CFO who is holding back key information that both the CMO and the CRO needs.

Hey, maybe it's the CEO that's holding back. Maybe the company is very profitable, but they're putting it somewhere else. Maybe they're not sharing those profits in the way you think they are. So there's a lot to be understood here and unpacked. Look in companies, there's some things that are private.

We can have private things. Not everything is shared with everybody, but we do need to be able to show some of our cards, things that are appropriate to share. So we need to have a dialogue where the CRO can come in and say, you know what? My team is taking your leads. And it turns out they didn't do anything with them.

I'm really sorry we were a bust because I didn't even realize this, but I found out the leads had been sitting somewhere and we hadn't worked them. Okay, let's work with that. We need to be able to say that and understand what's going on and we need to move on. So the last part of successful collaboration is that you have to have people involved who are motivated to win. Now, not just motivated for themselves, but they're motivated for the whole team.

Now, I have some people who say, oh no, I just love working for the team. No, that is not how humans work. We work for ourselves primarily, that is just true. Okay, so can we get over that? You can be motivated for yourself.

That is completely acceptable. Get your KPIs, get your quotas, get your numbers in, but you also have to be motivated to win for others. And in my opinion, if these three things are not met, you cannot have collaboration become a success. So that's where the CEO, the CRO, the CFO, the CMO, whoever needs to have that conversation about budget allocation, they really need to think it through. If I'm going to ask this team to collaborate to meet a joint goal, have I set these three things up so that the framework is proper?

Are they just sitting in the same room together, accomplishing geography, or are they truly collaborating? We don't need to be friends with everybody we work with. At the end of the day, if the CRO and the CMO are going to collaborate, it's not about liking each other. It's not about exchanging Christmas cards and going on vacation together. It's about recognizing that when you truly collaborate, you create bigger wins for yourself and other people.

So if you can go into it purely selfish, that's okay. It will work as long as the collaboration is set properly because when you win, other people win and you can set whatever weird personality trait aside, or your fake needs or whatever it is that's blocking you in this moment, and you can stop fighting over pieces of that cake because instead you've made a conscious decision that we're all going to make a bigger cake. Just to wrap things up, I truly believe that the CMO CRO gap is not about a personality problem. It is a design problem, and companies often create it by misaligning incentives, and then they wonder why these leaders are not working together. But if you fix the foundation with shared goals, clear definitions about what a marketing qualified lead actually means, what a sales qualified lead actually means, and genuine collaboration, you don't just close the gap, you turn it into a competitive advantage.

And when marketing and sales work together, especially in B2B, lead generation strategies with alignment, revenue becomes predictable. So stop treating this like a people problem and start treating it like the system problem it is. I hope that really helps you make your next big win through collaboration. From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.