Christian Klepp  00:00

In this competitive B2B landscape, it’s imperative that all functions within an organization work together to generate revenue and grow the business. If the marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned, that’s the perfect recipe for disaster. So how can you bring these two functions together, get them aligned, and gear them up for success? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. And I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Jeff Hoffman, who will be answering this question. Jeff is a fractional and interim Chief Revenue Officer working with small to mid sized enterprise software and SaaS tech companies worldwide. His expertise includes close to 30 years in the enterprise software and SaaS tech industry. Find out more about what his mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:47

All right, I’m going to say Mr. Jeff Hoffman, welcome to the show, Sir.

Jeff Hoffman  00:51

Thank you very much, Christian. Pleasure to be with you. 

Christian Klepp  00:55

Great to have you on the show, Jeff. And before we dive in, if you’ll permit me, let me just set this up for the audience a little bit, right? Because this is a podcast specifically targeting B2B marketers. So for the audience out there, you might be wondering, well, if that’s the case, then how come you’ve got the CRO on the show? And I’ll tell you why. I personally did not start out in marketing. I started out as a sales guy, right? I went out into the field. I was in the trenches, and I think every responsible B2B marketer should understand what it’s like out in the field. They should understand what sales go through. They should understand the challenges and objections they face. They also should understand how the company generates revenue, right? 

Christian Klepp  01:39

And for that reason, it’s in the interest of marketers to collaborate with sales as best as they can. So now that I’ve said that, that’s the reason why I’ve got somebody like Mr. Jeff Hoffman on the show, right? So let’s dive right in. Okay, so Jeff, you are on a mission to help companies increase revenue performance and decrease time with the wrong prospects. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, how to get alignment between B2B, marketing and sales and gear them up for success. So I’d like to kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. First question is, where do you see the big disconnect between marketing and sales and number two, where do you see most teams struggle?

Jeff Hoffman  02:30

Well, the big disconnect is a lot of marketing people, and this is not a knock on marketing, per se, but where the disconnect often comes from is marketing and sales should be a team sport. Number one, it’s not two individuals supporting, you know, the top line of a company, it’s, Hey, we’re collaborating, but when you don’t see the collaboration done correctly, you see marketing people believing, in today’s day and age that once they put a bucket of leads into a coffer, they just run around and say, You know, it’s easy for them to say, well, here are the leads. These are the MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead), we’ve qualified the leads like the old Glengarry Glen Ross show, where, you know the movie. Here are the good leads. Well, not so fast. Are they really qualified leads before you’re handing them off to sales. And I think this is an inherent problem if you have marketing people who’ve never been in the field, and they’re handing off what they deem to believe are a book of real opportunities, because they got them either through, you know, inbound lead sourcing through the website, or a set of SDRs (Sales Development Representative) running around in another country, you know, handing off a whole bunch of leads and saying, Here you go. These are the MQLs now hand them to your sales people, and if they can’t do anything with them, they must be bad salespeople. So there is the initial disconnect. 

Jeff Hoffman  04:32

To the second part of your question. If you have real qualified leads to hand to the seller, I think where the teams struggle collectively, marketing teams with the sales team are in general, lead generation and then taking real leads and further qualifying them as the set. So the lead gen is an issue for marketing today, because you cannot do what was done more effectively, up to like the year 2015 you cannot easily, if you’re unless you are a branded company in the marketplace, it’s very hard to be a no name company and expect people to talk to the stranger, so you have to come up with some very creative lead generation marketing strategies to create real, qualified leads. That’s an inherent issue. But then you also then need a framework to be able to manage the sellers effectively, so that they are taking a lead that is hopefully real, and further qualifying it to determine whether it should even be in the CRM system, and how do you further qualify that lead, and then, you know, determine that it’s real, and assuming that it is, how do you then cultivate the opportunity over a period of time and forecast It accurately so that you avoid deals you know, slipping from quarter to quarter and or never closing at all. And that requires what I refer to as situational deal management, where you’re using, uh, a framework that I’ve built out over the years through my Hoff Scale Method that I’ve developed, um which is used to eradicate, you know, under performance at these companies. And the framework toggles a forecasting model with staged events, six staged events using a working close plan. And when you toggle those three things together, those three elements using the right coaching per deal, which means you got to have a really good sales manager, you will mitigate risk, which is critical. You want to mitigate risk, because you want to be able to say, Hey, we got a real deal, and we’re going to move that real deal through the pipeline, we’re going to forecast it accurately, and then we’re going to close it. So this is, this is the thing.

Christian Klepp  07:35

Yeah, some really great points you brought up there, Jeff. And thanks so much for that. I had a follow up question for you, just based on the disconnect between the teams, how much of that would you say is perhaps maybe for marketing, for lack of understanding of who the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is?

Jeff Hoffman  07:54

That’s a very good question, and that gets back to one of the things I do with my Hoff Scale Method. I want to make sure that there’s alignment wit