Happy Sunday, Everyone!
I hope you’re all enjoying the final weekend of April - it’s difficult to believe we’re already nearly 33% of the way through 2025, but here we are. Over the last few weeks, I’ve met with a number of clients and had more than a few conversations with sales leaders. Some were wonderfully productive, some were tense and some were downright confusing – but they got me thinking: where is the opportunity for marketing to learn from sales (and sales from marketing), and how do we make that happen?
Let’s start at the beginning:
For as long as I’ve worked in marketing, there’s been an uneasy peace - a managed tension - between sales and marketing: sales teams continually demand better leads; marketing teams are perpetually frustrated by sales follow-up, feedback and engagement. From a fundamental standpoint, it makes sense – salespeople are compensated (at least in part) on what they close; marketing teams are (more often than not) on salary. Different incentives, different outcomes.
Each team had its own systems, its own KPIs, and (too often) its own reality. That world is ending (thankfully).
We’ve entered an environment where customer acquisition costs are surging, media sources are fracturing, buying journeys are lengthening, and markets are increasingly saturated. Layer in the uncertainty created by a looming recession, persistently high interest rates, and an on-again, off-again trade war, and all of the ingredients for a reckoning are on the counter.
That means the separate peace - the functional divide between sales and marketing - is no longer viable. No organization can afford two separate growth engines pulling in different directions in these conditions. The future belongs to marketing organizations that integrate the rigor, discipline, and accountability of sales into their DNA.
Here’s the cold, hard truth: marketing without bottom-line accountability is dead.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow - but in the not-too-distant future. The marketing teams that thrive in 2025 will be the ones who think and act like elite sales organizations. That probably sounds scary, but it’s reality.
Here’s what that looks like.
Lesson #1: Obsession with Outcomes Over Outputs
In the sales world, success is black-and-white: did you close the deal or not? There’s no “atta-boy” coming for working late, and there’s certainly no consolation prize for bad beats. It’s close or walk - effort without results doesn’t earn you a bonus, it earns you a performance plan.
Marketing has been given a far looser leash. We’ve trained ourselves (and allowed other executives to expect) that marketing performance is about "awareness generated," "engagement increased," or "pipeline influenced.” Yes, performance marketing has started to make a dent in this perception, but that’s the exception, not the rule. Sit in any marketing meeting, and I’m sure you’ll see that far too many vanity metrics - and far too few meaningful ones - are presented.
There’s a reason the CMO is the shortest-tenured position in the C-Suite.
Moving forward, marketing teams must internalize this truth: activity is not an acceptable proxy for outcomes. Marketers must stop celebrating vanity metric wins (we increased CTR by 18% on this email send) unless those wins influence the metrics that matter (that subsequent traffic increase resulted in 5 more SQLs this month vs. the prior one, on the same spend). Instead, marketing must judge itself (and report on) on business impact. Anything else is delusion, fantasy or both.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Growth budgets are under heavier scrutiny. Investors are demanding faster paths to profitability. The days when marketing could get away with claiming that "brand awareness" is a valid excuse for an underperforming pipeline are going the way of the dinosaurs.
CMOs are now routinely being asked by boards and CEOs:
- How exactly is Marketing impacting sales velocity?
- What else can be done to increase deal size?
- Where are we shaving CAC?
- How can we increase LTV via upsells, cross-sells or new products?
- What percentage of our revenue is truly marketing-sourced?
Marketing leaders who can provide clear, succinct, data-informed answers to those questions are the ones securing larger budgets and expanding influence. The others? Losing both.
Making this shift is not just philosophical. It demands structural and operational changes:
1. Reverse-Engineer Every Campaign
There’s a reason I love forecasting for marketing: it forces marketers to connect our activities to their desired outcomes. It’s an exercise in execution as much as (if not more than) an exercise in planning. The good news is that you don’t need to be an excel wizard to implement it - just start with a revenue target and work backward to marketing’s role in achieving it.
If you work for a mid-size B2B company that needs $10M in net-new revenue in Q3, then:
- Calculate the qualified pipeline needed to achieve $10M based on close rates and deal sizes. If your sales data shows a 30% SQL win rate, BUT only 75% of that is forecasted to close within 5 months (i.e., now until the end of Q3), then you need to build a pipeline that’s is (at least) $44.45M ($10M/(30%*75%).
- If the average value of a signed customer is $250k (just to make the math simple), and 25% of MQLs reach S QL status, then you need to generate ~534 MQLs in order to hit your $45.45M pipeline + $10M revenue goals.
- Given that objective, what channels and tactics provide the most efficient path to that outcome? What budget is required?
Anything outside that critical path is a distraction. One thing I’ve learned (and observed) from working with a ton of sales organizations: they are relentlessly focused on a singular, defined goal.
2. Redefine KPIs at Every Level
Scrap vanity metrics as key performance indicators. Instead, find the acceptable proxies that connect marketing activities to the core-four things that drive positive outcomes:
- Preference: There’s a reason we buy from one brand over another, or trust one provider over alternatives - it might be a belief (rooted in reality or not) of superior technology, a better process, a more talented team, a better product. The reason itself isn’t that important; what is critical is that it exists.
- Deal Size: Small deals are nice, but big deals are better. Generally, reaching your ideal customer profile (again, whether this is eComm or B2B doesn’t matter – the same thing holds true) is the easiest path toward bigger deals.
- Deal Velocity: Communications are natural motivators - they inspire action, create urgency and drive activity.
- Lifetime Value: Is your marketing creating one-time customers (or low-quality leads), or is it reaching, engaging and converting the kinds of people who are likely to be long-term customers/clients? Is it successfully re-engaging current or lapsed customers with upsell/cross-sell opportunities?
Marketing can (and should) influence each of these core-four things that every other executive/investor/founder cares about. Your challenge is to create KPIs that explicitly connect marketing activities to these things.
3. Tie Bonuses to Business Metrics
This one is controversial, but effective. I’m nothing if not a fan of Charlie Munger, and he put it best, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” If you want real behavior change, put money behind it. Align marketing team bonuses to:
- Pipeline sourced
- Opportunity progression rates
- Revenue contribution
When marketers’ incentives mirror sales incentives, alignment becomes natural, not negotiated.
If marketing is to be measured by business impact, then it must think about customer/client pipeline the same way sales does: not as a static output, but as a living system that demands discipline, inspection, and proactive management.
Lesson #2: Relentless Pipeline Discipline
For sales organizations, pipeline isn’t a report generated once a quarter; it’s a living, breathing system you manage daily. Sales teams are constantly inspecting, adjusting, qualifying, and requalifying their pipeline, all in service of achieving their revenue/profit/sales goals.
High-performing sales teams know:
- An overinflated pipeline full of junk deals is worse than no pipeline at all
- Early-stage opportunity signals mean nothing without progression
- Winning isn’t about stacking leads; it’s about advancing real opportunities at speed
- A quick “no” is better than a long “yes”
By contrast, far too many marketing teams operate with a “gold panner”, quantity-drives-quality view: generate leads → pass them to sales → rinse/repeat. The underlying theory is simple: if you sift enough sediment, you’ll eventually find some gold. The problem is that marketing teams don’t consider the opportunity cost of sifting through that sediment; the time required to do the sifting is exponentially more than the time required to do the scooping.
This creates an enormous gap – along with an unhealthy amount of friction: sales sees marketing leads as low-quality; marketing blames sales for not following up fast enough or ignoring what appear to be good opportunities.
But underneath that dysfunction is a simple truth: marketing needs to think about pipeline with the same discipline, scrutiny, and urgency that sales does.
Economic pressure is shifting how buyers move through funnels:
- Sales cycles are longer
- Budgets are tighter
- Scrutiny is greater
- Stakeholder skepticism is higher
In this environment, pipeline health is a critical leading indicator of future revenue viability. Weak pipelines today mean missed quarters three, six or nine months from now. CMOs who can diagnose, defend, and improve pipeline health at the board level will hold their seats and their budgets. Those who can't will find themselves replaced by marketers who can.
1. Reframe Lead Generation as Pipeline Creation
Stop thinking about lead volume. Start thinking about sales-qualified pipeline contributions. Not all leads are created equal:
- A "hand-raiser" from a Fortune 100 target account is not the same as a free ebook downloader from an unqualified geography.
- A 10:1 lead-to-opportunity ratio sounds good on a dashboard but means nothing if 90% of those "leads" never had a chance of closing.
Action: Define clear lead qualification frameworks tied to revenue potential, not just marketing actions completed. Update your lead scoring models to reflect what is actually predictive of lead quality (if you’re not sure how to do it, this is a place where AI can be wildly helpful).
2. Embed Marketing into Pipeline Reviews
Sales pipeline reviews shouldn't happen without marketing at the table. Marketers need to hear:
- Why specific leads aren’t converting
- Where sales sees friction points
- What pipeline gaps are emerging across territories or verticals
- What objections are being surfaced during sales calls
Without this insight, marketing optimization is blind.
Action: Make joint pipeline reviews (weekly or biweekly) mandatory. Hold marketing equally accountable for stage progression and aging deal risk.
3. Introduce Pipeline Health Metrics for Marketing
Beyond Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), marketing teams should track:
- MQL → Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) conversion rates
- SAL → SQL conversion rates
- SQL → Closed-Won contribution
- Average pipeline velocity for marketing-sourced deals
- Average deal size variance between marketing-sourced and sales-sourced pipeline
If marketing-sourced opportunities close slower or smaller, that's a signal marketing needs to optimize creative, targeting and/or nurture strategies, not just generate more leads.
Action: Publish a "Marketing Pipeline Health Report" monthly, shared across marketing, sales, and leadership.
4. Own Pipeline Acceleration, Not Just Sourcing
Contrary to popular belief, marketing’s job doesn’t end once a lead becomes a sales opportunity. Modern marketing must actively contribute to accelerating late-stage deals:
- Nurture stalled opportunities with relevant case studies, write-ups, testimonials or other proof points
- Build late-stage content like ROI calculators, customer validation decks, competitor comparison tools
- Trigger ABM re-engagement plays when opportunities stall
Action: Create "pipeline acceleration playbooks" by vertical, persona, or deal stage. Your goal
Lesson #3: Customer-Centric Communication
Elite salespeople instinctively understand one truth: Selling isn’t about speaking. It’s about listening.
The best salespeople customize every conversation to the buyer’s context, adapting in real-time based on the prospect’s needs, language, emotions, and objections. Sales is a dance, and the successful salesperson has an intuitive “feel” for when to lead, when to follow, when to push, and when to go with the flow.
Contrast that dynamism and adaptability to marketing, where too many marketing teams still build messaging like a monologue:
- One-size-fits-all assets
- Product-centric language
- Internal brand narratives prioritized over external buyer realities
This gap isn’t just a B2B problem; it’s endemic across eComm and consumer brands, too.
How many email promos, social ads, or landing pages still blast generic "10% Off!" offers without segmenting by customer behavior, purchase history, or intent? How often do you receive a mailer for a product you’d never use (I just got one today for hearing aids), or are targeted with an angle/pain point you’ve never felt before?
Whether you’re selling multi-million-dollar SaaS platforms or $180 sneakers, the rule is the same: marketing that feels mass-produced is marginalized; marketing that feels personal opens up the (proverbial) purse. (I’m going for some alliteration).
Customers/clients today are more demanding, discerning and empowered than they have been at any previous point in history. That’s the internet effect - when everyone has the whole of human knowledge in their pocket, they tend to use it (just not in the way or on the schedule that most of us would prefer). But even more fundamentally: customers today expect marketing to know them, anticipate their needs and speak their language.
This isn’t just theory, either - there’s real stats to back it up: according to Gartner, 83% of a B2B buying journey happens without direct interaction with a salesperson. Meanwhile in B2C, McKinsey reports that 71% of consumers now expect personalized interactions — and 76% are frustrated when they don’t get them. Translation:
- In B2B, bad messaging kills deals before discovery calls even happen
In B2C, bad messaging gets your emails deleted and your ads skipped without a second thought
The brands that win are those that adopt the sales mindset of treating every communication as a high-stakes, buyer-centric interaction. Here are four ways you can do that today:
1. Mine Sales Conversations and Customer Data at Scale
For lead-centric (whether B2B or B2C) brands, the untapped goldmine is live sales conversations; For eComm, its customer service transcripts, review data, and purchase behavior signals. Each one of these offers truly staggering volumes of insights - if you’re willing to do the work (or, let’s be real: set up an AI to do it).
If you’re not systematically mining:
- Discovery calls
- CRM opportunity notes
- Product reviews
- Post-purchase surveys
...then you’re building a marketing program designed to appeal to your perception of your customer, not your actual customer. That tends to go poorly.
Action: Implement a "Voice of the Customer" program:
- Lead Gen: analyze at least 10 sales conversations per week
- eComm: analyze 100+ product reviews or customer chats per month
- Everyone: automate an email from an executive to go to X (5, 10, 20) customers/clients each week, asking a few critical questions. Ask the recipients to reply directly to the email with their feedback, then use Zapier to dump the responses into a Google Sheet, and have Gemini analyze them to surface trends and outliers.
Capture key emotional words, frustrations, triggers, then build messaging around those realities, instead of internal assumptions, historical data points or irrelevant/antiquated surveys.
2. Rebuild Personas Around Emotional Drivers
I recently had an incredibly frustrating experience with a client’s brand-new buyer personas. As you might expect, these were beautifully produced by whatever agency did them – custom graphics, snappy powerpoint presentation, more than a heaping helping of marketing jargon. A marketer’s dream come true.
My issue was that, when you cut through all the fluff and pictures and mood boards, you ended up with demographics and pictures: "Millennial shopper, female, urban, mid-income, loves Starbuck, Lululemon, pilates/yoga"
That’s not helpful. It’s just laziness with prettier pictures. Real buying behavior, whether enterprise software or consumer skincare, is driven by one (or more) of seven triggers:
- Pain
- Fear of Loss (FOMO)
- Desire for Gain
- Social Identity + Status
- Convenience
- Trust/Risk Mitigation
- Emotional Resonance
Salespeople intuitively understand this, and they are masters at deducing which one(s) are motivating their prospect, then sculpting their conversations around those the most resonant motivator. As marketers, we need to take a page from the sales team and do more of that.
Action:
Rebuild personas to map emotional motivators, perceived risks, and unspoken aspirations — not just functional needs. For example:
- B2B: "Enterprise CIO seeking a best-in-class cybersecurity solution that mitigates data breach/cyber attack risk with minimal disruption to ongoing initiatives.”
- B2C: "Urban/Suburban female seeking trendy skincare that projects health and confidence without overwhelming routines."
Each of these (admittedly basic) examples speaks directly to the motivations (i.e., the CIO is seeking a trusted brand and risk mitigation - s/he doesn’t care about value or gain. The motivator is - to be blunt - a trustworthy CYA solution that doesn’t make too many other people upset).
3. Integrate Objection Handling into Core Messaging
One thing you’ll notice in every call with a great salesperson: they don’t avoid objections - instead, they surface and address them proactively. If you don’t believe me, go to a car dealership (please don’t buy a car willy-nilly) and talk to a salesperson. Note how they ask questions to suss out your motivators, timeline, seriousness, fears, etc. – then immediately raise and demolish the objections.
Concerned about price? We have some incredible options that could get you into a 2025 Make/Model for just $YYY a month.
Worried about safety? These vehicles are built to the most stringent safety standards, informed by today’s data - whereas older cars (like your 2017 Camry) are not.
Trying to communicate status? Let me show you this Make/Model - everyone wants them, but they’re near-impossible to get because of [situation]. We happen to have this one on the lot.
Marketing should do the same.
Action: Proactively answer objections inside marketing assets:
- B2B: Use proof-based storytelling (e.g., "95% implementation success within 60 days") for each objection you’ve found/uncovered from those sales calls.
- B2C: Embed trust signals (e.g., sizing guides, "hassle-free returns," peer reviews) directly into product pages and email flows, based on the most common objections/negative reviews/customer support chats.
Lesson #4: Agility and Iterative Experimentation
Elite salespeople adapt in real time. They adjust messaging immediately in response to a buyer’s tone shifts. They pivot strategy mid-conversation if a new stakeholder enters the room. They treat every interaction as a live test, adjusting and pivoting their approach until they find resonance.
Most marketing teams, by contrast, are still operating like it’s 1995:
- Quarterly planning cycles
- Locked-down campaigns
- Six-month content calendars
- Post-mortem learning instead of in-flight optimization
In today's environment, where buyer expectations shift weekly and competitive landscapes evolve overnight, static marketing is dead marketing.
Speed wins. Adaptation wins. Test-learn-evolve cultures crush plan-and-pray cultures. Whether you’re running a billion-dollar B2B SaaS company or a trendy new DTC apparel brand, the ability to learn, iterate and evolve at breakneck speed is the new marketing superpower.
None of this is new, but it is being put to the test with the current macro landscape. McKinsey found that 75% of U.S. consumers changed buying behavior during the GFC, and most didn’t return to their previous brand choices afterward. In the B2B world, things have never been this competitive. Gartner reports that buyers evaluate an average of 5+ vendors simultaneously — and decision processes shift dynamically during evaluation.
In both worlds, static campaigns built on yesterday’s assumptions will not survive tomorrow’s buying behavior. The organizations that win will be the ones that operationalize marketing agility the same way sales teams do:
1. Run True Agile Marketing Sprints
Most teams claim to be "agile" because they have sprints, standups or retros. Real agility means building, launching, and optimizing campaigns in 4-7 day cycles, not 2–3 month planning windows. Customer behavior changes at TikTok speed; the teams that can identify a trend, turn it into an angle, and launch it in hours or days are miles ahead of the legacy brands struggling to keep up.
One example of this in action comes from Pela Case (the phone case brand) - in less than 72 hours after the “Liberation Day” announcements, their team had come up with 2 new campaigns (1 targeting Canada and 1 targeting the US market), build messaging for both, recorded videos for both, and created landers for both. They were in-market with new angles + offers before their competitors even crunched the numbers on what the tariffs actually meant for their bottom-line. That’s agile marketing. More marketing teams need to adopt this ethos.
Action: Adopt a sprint-based operating model:
- Sprint Planning: Identify 1–3 key marketing hypotheses to test every sprint (e.g., new audience segment, new creative angle, new CTA structure).
- Sprint Execution: Build a minimum-viable-model. No bloated asset libraries or over-the-top production setups. Get out the iPhones and the ring lights, write the script yourself, and get to work.
Sprint Review: Analyze results with brutal honesty. Scale what worked. Kill or evolve what didn’t
2. Launch Minimum Viable Campaigns (MVCs)
Sales teams don’t rehearse for months before making a single pitch. They build muscle through volume and iteration. Marketing teams must adopt the same mindset: get to market fast with minimum viable campaigns.
An MVC isn't sloppy. It’s focused:
- A landing page, two ad variations, and a simple retargeting loop
- A segmented email series with two tone/style variants to test
- A webinar pilot with one key persona
- A new lander type built using existing components
- Ad creatives built in Canva or filmed on an iPhone
More and more today, perfect is the enemy of the good. Being late is worse than being wrong. Constantly push yourself (and your teams) to identify the absolutely essential components of any test and execute those as quickly as possible. Then, if (and only if) the initial data supports it, go back to iterate and evolve what you’re doing.
3. Kill Underperforming Tactics Fast
Agility isn’t just about launching faster. It’s about stopping sooner.
The biggest budget killer in marketing isn’t failed experiments. It’s zombie campaigns - the initiatives that underperform but stay alive because nobody wants to admit they missed or because everyone is afraid that those campaigns are doing something they’re not.
Action: Adopt a "kill quickly" culture:
- Set kill criteria upfront for every campaign (e.g., if CTR <0.5% after $2K spend, pause)
- Celebrate fast failures as learning milestones, not career risks
- Publicly reallocate budget from failing campaigns to experiments that show early traction
Lesson #5: Personal Accountability and Ownership
In Sales, accountability is binary: quota achieved or quota missed. It’s that simple. Excuses - whether they’re in the form of economic conditions, competitor actions, inbound volume - may be discussed, but never accepted as justification for failure.
Marketing, however, often operates in collective ambiguity. Campaigns are launched, creative is tested, KPIs are reviewed…but when performance targets are missed, responsibility is spread to the four winds, across teams, vendors, and/or external factors.
This must change.
Today’s environment demands that ownership be as sharp and unambiguous as a sales rep's responsibility.
Strategic Actions:
- Stage Ownership Models: Assign individuals specific ownership over key stages of the buyer journey (Awareness, Consideration, Intent, Purchase) with clear performance KPIs for each.
- Revenue-Linked Incentives: Move beyond team bonuses tied to generic marketing metrics. Link compensation to pipeline impact, opportunity progression, and even deal close rates.
- Forensic Campaign Reviews: After every major initiative, run formal retrospectives asking: Did we move the business forward? If not, document why - and own it without excuse.
- Culture of Accountability: Ultimately, accountability is a culture. It’s a mindset. In my office, I have a card: “Life’s too interesting to make the same mistake twice.” That perfectly sums up my perspective on accountability - it isn’t there to punish, it’s there to encourage new exploration and growth.
The gap between traditional, old-school marketing and modern, business-focused marketing is real, and it’s widening.
Marketing organizations that continue operating as service departments - optimizing for reach, impressions, content output, and MQL volume - will find themselves increasingly marginalized, underfunded, and eventually replaced.
The future belongs to marketing leaders who think, operate, and deliver like sales leaders:
- Obsessed with outcomes, not outputs
- Disciplined about pipeline quality and stage progression
- Fanatically customer-centric in communication and messaging
- Agile and experimental in go-to-market execution
- Personally accountable for business results
As you plan your next month/quarter/year, ask yourself these questions:
- What percentage of our marketing activities can be directly tied to revenue growth — whether through pipeline creation (B2B) or direct transactions and customer lifetime value (B2C)?
- How many of our campaigns were informed by real customer interactions, like live sales conversations, service feedback, or behavioral data, vs. internal marketing assumptions?
- Where are we systematically mining and operationalizing buyer insights surfaced by frontline teams (sales, support, success) across every customer journey stage?
- Who owns the business outcome at each critical point of our funnel, from first touch to conversion to loyalty? Are they measured by KPIs that align with that stage?
- How fast are we testing, learning, and adapting compared to competitors?
If these answers are unclear, fragmented, or uncomfortable, that’s a good thing. Discomfort is the first step toward transformation. The path forward isn’t easy, but it’s simple:
- Prioritize revenue impact over internal recognition.
- Build a culture/marketing organization where outcome ownership is personal, not theoretical.
- Collapse the divides between internal functions (sales, customer success/support, product, marketing), with a focus on shared success.
- Move at the speed of the market, not the speed of internal approval cycles.
It is no longer tenable for marketing and sales to tolerate one another, or to live in a state of uneasy peace – the stakes are too high, your customer is too informed, and your competitors too smart. If you want to win, sales and marketing need to become allies, partners and staunch advocates for one another.
The good news is that most organizations have not caught up to this trend. The opportunity is there for the taking - the question is who’s going to do it.
Until next week,
Cheers,
Sam
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