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Chapter 10How to Partner with Sales

When this company's midmarket sales team badly missed their sales target, they arrived at their quarterly review meeting with only one request: paper data sheets.

This was not 20 years ago—it was just a handful—when digital only product collateral was the norm. The marketing team was stunned. Not only was no other sales team asking for it, but it was this sales team's only ask.

When pressed, the team said they needed a leave-behind that prospective customers brought back to their desks and that kept the product more top-of-mind than an email. Plus no one else was doing paper data sheets so it stood out.

This sales team was notorious for going after companies that weren't quite the target customers the sales playbook was built for. The marketing team asked if the wrong customers were being targeted and if that was a possible reason for the team's shortfall. The sales lead rebuffed the question, “No, we just need paper data sheets.”

The problem was not that one team was right and the other wrong. It was that there was a demand, not a discussion, in which sales presumed the solution (paper data sheet) instead of asking for what they needed: a more memorable prompt encouraging follow-up. It also didn't bode well for the marketing-sales relationship that marketing couldn't ask about how prospects were being targeted without sales getting defensive.

Much like a product manager takes customer input to create the best product for what a customer ...