Why Change Selling Blog

The news is that the state of the union between sales and marketing is not all bad. Like President Obama's State of the Union message, we're doing well in some areas, but have a long way to go in others.


The state of the union between sales and marketing is imperfect, but growing stronger and the hard work and dedication of the pioneers is beginning to deliver quantifiable results. It is our unfinished task to ensure that both sales and marketing teams are served by the sales and marketing alignment process, not just a vocal few in sales.

The changes in buyer behavior are permanent and both sales and marketing must unite and adopt a new vocabulary, new methods and embrace new technologies to more effectively serve buyers, achieve revenue goals and to lower the cost of acquiring and servicing customers.

We need to recognize that for sales and marketing to best serve today's Internet savvy, socially connected buyer, we need to evolve one contiguous and tightly coupled revenue generation process. The outbound "hunter" B2B sales role as we knew it, is giving way to scientific methods of lead generation, lead nurturing and scoring, marketing automation, free trials and light-touch engagement across the IMPACT buying process.

Inbound Leads vs. Traditional Outbound Leads

Mark Roberge, VP Sales at HubSpot is a 10 on a scale of 1-10 of the smartest sales leaders I know. When he talks about sales and marketing alignment, I listen.

Earlier this year I ran a Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment workshop for an early stage company in the Bay Area. They are not actually a start-up as they have been in business for a few years, but they are still starting up.

The subject of capturing proof points and formatting them to tell stories came up during the messaging workshop and I want to use a story to illustrate the point of using a storytelling and to describe the discrete steps in the storytelling format. I partner with Mike Bosworth and use his Story Seekers method in formatting and telling stories. The format is universally understood and follows the basic "hero's journey" format that powers so many of the scripts in our popular film culture.

The people in the company I'm working with are World-class thought leaders in their field, they have a great product for a well-defined niche, but they are struggling.


Their messaging clarity was 3/10 and their website unclear and they got few inbound leads. Like many other emerging technology companies, they were using outbound cold calling and spamming lists to generate interest and not surprisingly had very little success.

An additional problem was that the few leads they got often proved to be unready for sales contact. We (Kuno Creative and Admarco) were hired to help clarify their messaging and to transform their Website and implement an inbound marketing methodology.

After clearly identifying their capabilities or Win-Themes and applying them to their Buyer Personas in the messaging workshop, I asked a couple of the top salespeople to role-play with me around the buyer persona issues, using the capabilities we had developed. 

What happened next is happening in sales teams all over the World and explains why so many salespeople are struggling. They have plenty of success stories or proof points, but they don't have the stories in a usable storytelling form … and salespeople don't have the skills to relate their story.
(The barrier or status quo in the last sentence is the fact that they don't have the stories in a usable form – at their fingertips; the complication is that they don't have storytelling skills - even if they had the stories.)  

But let me get back to the story and role-play.