Collaboration is not Geography: What CMOs and CROs Actually Owe Each Other

Priscilla McKinney:

Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and Mama Bird, and the host of this podcast. Thanks for joining us today. Yes, I am the CEO of a marketing agency, and often I serve as a fractional CMO for clients. But my hidden genius is that I'm a dyed in the wool salesperson.

Because of my entrepreneurial background, I can't imagine any other reason for engaging in marketing. Except for to grow a company's revenue. So too often marketing gets so far removed from sales, and that accounts for about, I don't know, 80 to 90 percent of the problems I see today. So let me kind of explain this a little bit.

Get in your mind the CMO and the CRO at any given company. So let's think about what they have in common. They're typically in the same leadership meeting, they're possibly in the same building. They certainly go to the same retreats or strategy meetings and they possibly even have been on the same weekly call for the last two years, right?

But what sets them apart? Well, as it turns out, an awful lot. And many times these two people are not on the same page. They're not collaborating, despite how close, metaphorically or literally, they are in the company. And it turns out that proximity did not fix a single thing.

So today's episode is called Collaboration is Not Geography, What CMOs and CROs Actually Owe Each Other. And I want to tell you right up front why these two in particular cannot get their act together historically. I also want to say if you're in one of these seats and you're frustrated, don't feel the judgment. Instead, let me help.

If you lead these people, don't come down on them too quickly without understanding why they are often miles apart. So let's pick at this a bit and see if we can find some solutions where there really are so many problems. First, let's take a look at their bonus structure.

The CMO typically is bonused on brand trackers and marketing KPIs. Whenever I use acronyms in the show, I like to say what they are. So KPIs are key performance indicators. And the CRO is bonused on closed revenue.

You cannot ask two people to walk into the same room and be on a team when their paychecks are quietly telling them to compete. So, what does this look like in real life? Well, marketing says, Hey, we delivered the leads. And sales says, Hey, those leads stunk. And marketing says, hmm, half of them never even got worked.

And it goes on and on and on. Does this sound familiar? The reality is that they're both right, and that's the part nobody wants to admit. From inside marketing's measurement system, they did deliver. From inside sales measurement systems, those leads were garbage.

And that fight is a symptom of a deeper incentive problem, right? So let's go deep on one example because I think this is where it gets really juicy. It's the handoff of the MQL or what we'd call the marketing qualified lead to the SQL, what sales would consider a sales qualified lead.

Let's just say someone downloads an ebook. Somebody sits through a webinar. Okay, those two things are triggers. That's curiosity at best. Now compare that to someone who is asking about pricing or requesting a demo. That's what I would call a serious hand raising.

Let me go back, let's go back to the deeper thing where I said that fight is a symptom of a deeper incentive problem. And as Charlie Munger famously said, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. Right. So let me explain this to you in one example, because I think this is where it can really get juicy and where you can really apply some learning.

The one I want to focus on is that handoff from an MQL, which is a marketing qualified lead, to an SQL, a sales qualified lead. Okay. So let's say that someone downloads an ebook or somebody sits through a webinar. Now that's curiosity at best. Now that is a marketing qualified lead, right?

But let's compare that to someone asking about pricing or requesting a demo or taking a meeting with a sales leader. That is a sales qualified lead. That is what I would say is a hand-raising gesture that shows intent, buying intent. So you can see these are completely different animals.

One shows curiosity, the other shows intent to buy. And when marketing hands sales a pile of MQLs and calls them sales ready, I'm gonna be honest with you, sales is right to call that a load of crap. However, it is the job of the sales team to take those MQLs and find out who can be turned into an SQL.

And so the danger here is that if you have a company that is just calling a lead a lead is a lead is a lead, that is not helpful. And getting that little bit of a differentiation in your naming convention can be a world of help. So, in that handoff, that is the exact moment where most B2B lead generation efforts quietly fall apart.

It happens right there at the handoff. The second someone decides a passive download belongs further down the lead generation funnel, then it's actually earned. And listen, some companies have figured this out. And instead of stuffing the funnel and sorting it out later, they build their list from intent in the first place.

But I think you need both things. Yes, you're gonna spend more time and you're gonna go after accounts that already are showing you that buying intent. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. But let's go back to that meeting. Sitting in the same meetings, being down the hall from each other, hopping on a video call five times a week, all of those things are really just geography.

And this is the whole thesis of the episode. So lean in right here. You can get the same people in the same room, but that does not make them a team. Real collaboration requires three things. And I outlined this in my book called Collaboration is the New Competition.

And lest you think that that competition is happening only outside your business walls, the competition is happening inside as well. So listen up. The first thing that has to be true is that everybody involved has to actually have something to win and something to lose, right?

Okay, so these are the three things. The first thing that must be present is that everyone involved needs to have something to win and something to lose. And I do mean and. The second thing is that they need to have transparency. They have to be willing to show their cards, right?

And then thirdly, they need to have the will to win, a motivation to win for themselves and also a motivation to win for other people involved. So if you miss one of those three, you simply have geography and you do not have collaboration, right?

And by the way, this is exactly why so many companies bring in an outside set of eyes, a fractional CMO, or someone who just isn't tangled up in either of the department's bonuses plan. They walk in, they see the incentive problem in about 10 minutes and say out loud the part that everyone has been avoiding because the internal teams are usually too close to the problem.

Now, even when a team wants to hit those three requirements, there's still a trap waiting for them. And that is hierarchy in the room. The truth is that whoever has the higher position in the room usually talks first, they talk the loudest, and they talk the longest.

Now, I'm just saying this from experience. I do this myself. I'm the CEO. I have to check myself at the door before I walk into a room that I know I'm expected to lead in that room because otherwise I will fill it all up with things I have to say, even without meaning to take up that much space.

So if that's the case between sales and marketing, we need to think very intelligently, mindfully, intentionally about who is going to speak and why. So here's the fix. And I actually steal this from how I think about LinkedIn. I like to treat that room like a cocktail party.

Get curious about the other person instead of leading with your title or your credentials. Think about how you can get someone to say something interesting, something unexpected. Those are the kinds of things that make a cocktail party interesting.

And if nobody thinks you're interesting at a cocktail party, then they're not going to talk to you and they're not going to give you space. And no if nobody thinks you're interesting, you know, you're not gonna be invited back, to be honest, right?

And you're not just interesting because you showed up with that fancy job title. People also think you're interesting, even when you just are showing that you're interested in them, right? So that is an interesting mindset you could use when you talk with the sales and marketing teams together. And that's it.

That's the whole secret. It's a little shift, it's curiosity over dominance. It's one of the more counterintuitive tips that I give leaders because most of us were trained to do the exact opposite, especially the higher we climb. But it's also just a really smart thought leadership strategy in general.

People remember how you made them feel in the room a lot longer than they remember your title. We can thank Maya Angelou for that little diddy. Of course, I changed it a little bit for sales and marketing. But the reason why that matters is that we have to get to the bottom of what is happening between sales and marketing.

And to do that, we need people to understand that we are interested in their perspective. Now, once the room is actually aligned, I'll say it plainly: the dashboards, the CRM, the tracking system, all of it matters so much less than people think, than that. Personal alignment.

Now, I'm telling you, I love me a good dashboard. The cleaner my CRM is, the happier I am. And a tracking system is absolutely important, but it is worth nothing if the room is not in alignment, right? And I promise you that people constantly ask me about these tools for tracking all of this, but that alignment is so important.

Get away from geography, proximity, and instead really look for that collaboration. It really is fun when you start looking at it this way and you get the room agreeing on the goal and what actually matters for the company. So you might need to fix your incentives first because the software will not save you from a bad structure.

Right. So now let's zoom all the way out. Let's go past the CMO and the CRO. And okay, hold on. Just to give you some more value, let's actually now zoom all the way out past the CMO and the CRO fight entirely, because I think there's something else that matters here.

For example, a closed deal that churns within a year really served nobody, right? Not marketing, not sales, and not the client who bought. Which means that retention is a conversation that also needs to be in the room. So, retention, not just closing sales, should really be a shared metric that ties these two roles together long after the ink on the first deal is dry.

We all know this. It is much cheaper to get more work from an existing client than it is to go chase a new logo, right? So make this a part of your strategy, make this a part of your incentive plan, make this a part of the conversations. And this is really a big part of like land and expand strategies or even why account-based marketing strategies exist in the first place.

It's to say we don't just want customers, we want ideal customers. People that we serve well, who will be delighted by what we do. And we in turn will be motivated to continue to deliver to them well because it is a great fit. So done right, it forces both sides of sales and marketing to agree up front to the same targets.

Really, what is our target list? And what is our definition of a win way before any kind of a campaign starts? The same accounts would be in focus, the same finish line would be in focus. There wouldn't be arguing later about whose leads these were and if they were any good.

So if you want to see okay, sorry. So I can't take that. This is a new paragraph.

I hope that this simple but really transformational way of thinking about your sales and marketing teams is very helpful. And if you want to see how we approach that at Little Bird Marketing, the link is right there in the show notes. We would love for you to take a look at littlebirdmarketing.com and just understand what we do and why we care about the connection between sales and marketing.

So here's what I want you to walk away with. These two leaders, the CMO and the CRO, they don't need to like each other or really be incredibly super personable. no, God, let me start that again.

So here's what I want you to walk away with. These two leaders, the CRO and the CMO, they don't even really need to like each other, right? They can collaborate. And I really mean that. Professionals can collaborate on such a deep level, even if there's a personality mismatch.

But what actually matters is whether those three conditions are true. Everybody in the room needs something to win or and something. this is not right. win and lose. Okay, let's try this again.

So here's what I want you to walk away with. These two leaders, the CRO and the CMO, they don't even need to like each other personally to collaborate well. I really mean that. There can be some personality mismatches between those roles, but what actually matters is whether these three conditions are there to allow for collaboration.

Number one, everyone in the room needs to have something to win and something to lose. Number two, everyone in that room needs to be willing to show their cards, right? And number three, everyone in that room has to have a drive to win, both for themselves and for the group.

Get that right, and geography is no longer a thing. You'll get collaboration. You'll get the real thing. From all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.