Alignment and ABM

1. Why are sales and marketing still misaligned? It’s been over 20 years – is this even a fixable problem?

2. How have the responsibilities of those departments shifted in the past 30 years? How do they coincide with buyer behavior?

3. You believe ABM can be that bridge. In your own words, what is ABM?

4. Who’s responsible for ABM? Does it fall on the shoulders of leadership? A single department?

5. What does it look like when done correctly? What about when it’s done poorly? And how is that solving the misalignment issue we’re still seeing?

Top 3 Takeaways

🤬 “But these teams have always been ideally working towards the same goal, but doing it in different ways. And it’s a problem that existed 20 years ago. It’s a problem that existed 10 years ago. It’s a problem that still exists today. Why can’t we get this right?”

Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed. The Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Sales and Marketing.

Ok, maybe it’s not an iconic rivalry, but the bad blood between these two teams is no joke. And it’s not a recent issue either – Paul talks about the relationship between these teams from his time as a sales rep in the 90s. Spoiler alert – it wasn’t great.

• Part of it can be attributed to the historical burden on sales to create demand.

• Part of it can be attributed to the perception of marketing as the “make it pretty” department.

• Part of it can be attributed to the rise of inbound marketing and a shift to quantity over quality.

Whatever started the rift doesn’t matter. What matters now is the need for teams to join forces and create a journey that buyers want to take because guess what – buyer behavior has also changed dramatically over the past 20 years.

🎙️ We’ve talked about alignment a few times in the past. Check out some of our other content for more alignment tactics:

🥒 Building Sales & Marketing Alignment

🦈 Marketers Are Friends, Not Food

💪 The Power of Empowering Your SDRs

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💡 “So if you think about it, marketing’s job is to do everything to educate the buyer up to that moment. And then the minute that buyer has that aha moment and goes, ‘I wonder how this is gonna work in my environment,’ they need to talk to a salesperson because that question cannot be answered on a website.”

That “Aha!” moment is the key to having sales and marketing play nice. And realizing that was what pushed Paul into digital marketing in the first place.

When a buyer has consumed content on your product or solution and they’ve reached the education threshold (where consuming more won’t answer their specific questions), it’s time for sales to shine. But sales often wants to save the meaty and high-value content (slide decks, case studies, proofs of concept) for the discovery & demo phase.

Paul’s suggestion is to take that content and un-gate it, allowing the buyer to continue their education at a pace that makes sense for them. He’d rather pump out as much educational information as possible and optimize sales targeting for hand-raisers and browsers.

Let marketing be responsible for education and let sales be responsible for context. Then they have to work together to deliver a quality buyer’s journey.

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🎓 “What is ABM? It’s aligning your business, your content, and your actions around educating and engaging with a targeted group of stakeholders throughout their entire buyer journey.”

Continuing the idea from above, true ABM is about alignment.

It’s not about generating hundreds of MQLs a month and tossing them to sales for further qualification. It’s about moving targeted stakeholders through their buying journey.

That means sales and marketing need to come together to build:

• Target accounts

• Messaging

• Content to support outreach

• Processes to relay intent signals

• A demand generation strategy

The goal with ABM isn’t to just capture the demand of in-market accounts, it’s to create and sustain demand with accounts that aren’t in-market yet. That way, when those accounts are in-market, a large percentage of them will go to you.