An executive explains why sales and marketing teams in B2B companies send conflicting messages to buyers, eroding confidence. This misalignment led him to work with CEOs on fixing the problem, which became the foundation for the CRO Collective.
Where this is leading to is there was a point at which I became a buyer. Now I was an executive at a big holding company and one of my remits was to build a product for them, delivered to our clients, an advertising product, online advertising product. And that required that I had to buy technology from B2B companies. So now I'm a buyer with a budget, I'm a seller, I'm a marketer, and I'm being sold to five times a day by tech companies bringing their salespeople in, viewing me as their buyer. I mean, I look at it now, I can see the whole thing so clearly. I mean, I can imagine these guys coming into the office. So we're meeting with the EVP of xyz, you know, and he has budget and he has decision making power. All the stuff that sales people would do, and they come in, they try and do the assessment of my needs and ask me all the questions and show me the demo and all this stuff. This happened five times a day. And I was blown away by what I learned from this process being on the other side of it, because I was on that side of the table most of my career. And here I'm looking at these people and I was probably the worst person to sell to for this reason. And so what I saw was something that I knew, but it really didn't formulate till at this point with this level of clarity, and that is that I noticed that the sales teams that came in had their own perspective on how to talk to clients, prospects, how to talk about the product that were frequently, if not always, different than the way their marketing materials were. It was sometimes amazing how disparate these two things were. You know, so I would see the branding in the marketplace about this particular company. I would do my research on them, even the way just on their website, where they talked about what they did or solutions they solved. And then when the salespeople came in, many times it was not the same. In some cases, almost different. And what had occurred to me was many times is, and this happens with most people who run businesses is when they start a company, they have an initial idea of how they want to talk to customers, but then it evolves because as they sell into the marketplace, they start to develop a different way to talk to customers, but they don't update their marketing materials to reflect that, and they let the salespeople do it. And this is a very big issue. It goes on today a lot. And what it does, it creates buyer confusion. And for me, what it created not necessarily confusion. It was more like, hey, hold on a second. I thought you guys did this. I didn't know that. But what it really did to me as a buyer was it created a lack of confidence. You know, these people, it occurred to me, like, they don't have their act together. Like, if they don't know what these two functions are doing, don't have an agreement or are not in alignment, which is a word we'll be using a lot. That said a lot to me about the company's maturity. To me, my attitude was, and still is, if you're going to go to market and sell products to customers, you need to have alignment between the way that you talk about things, because it sends a message to the marketplace if you don't. And it did to me. And so it started to happen a lot was I would see a lot of potentially good programs in the marketplace that would basically provide me with the solution that I wanted. But because of this issue, I didn't feel confident buying from them. And I started to call the CEOs of these companies, whom I had the ability to call them. I'm the buyer, you know, and I'd call them up and I'd say, look, your guys were just here, you know, good, good dudes, but I'm not going to buy from you because. And I'd explain why. I'd say, look, you guys are just here, and, you know, I'm not going to buy from you. And here's a why. And I'll explain, like, the experience I had. And this was, on many ways, a very jarring and valuable conversation. Who, what buyer ever calls the CEO and says the experience is. But I was interested in this. I was fascinated by it because I saw that this problem was pervasive. And I wanted the CEO to say, look, you're this close, man. You got this great product, right? But I got to tell you, you know, there's a thing going on with your company right now that has me think, this is going to have an impact on. On the. What's going to happen now when I become a customer? Is that going to be different? Like now all of a sudden? Is that experience going to be the same? And I can't make that risk. So as you could probably imagine, a lot of these founders and CEOs were, like, thrilled to get this call. This is very insightful for them. They'd say, can we talk? I'd like to ask you more questions about this. You know, I don't get these kind of insights from people And I said, sure. And so what ended up happening was I started getting hired by them as consultant to help them solve this problem. And they said, look, you know, we don't really get this sort of perspective from people who are in a position you're in, so what should we do about it?
