How Marketing Can Actually Help Your Sales Team Close More
If you’re a B2B CEO or marketing leader watching your sales team work harder to close opportunities without seeing better results, you’re not alone. Growing revenue today feels harder than ever before, even when your product is solid and your team is talented. But here’s what we’ve learned from working with companies: the problem usually isn’t your salespeople. It’s that marketing and sales aren’t set up yet as a single, coordinated revenue engine. Marketing can help sales.
The Real Roadblocks to B2B Growth
Many companies today find revenue growth harder and harder to achieve. Competitors have gotten better. Prospects have many ways to hide from your sales team. And the cost of switching from vendor to you seems to be higher than ever. What to do?
Solving these roadblocks typically calls for improvements in three critical areas: People, Process and Technology.
Process Problems: How do you actually handle incoming leads? What happens when a prospect emails a question, attends a webinar or visits your trade show booth? Does the prospect lead move quickly and automatically to an inside sales team, marketing team or direct sales rep? When does it go to a third-party rep firm or distributor? Do you handle that prospect differently if they’re a new contact, if they’ve been in your system for a year or so, or are a former customer? In many instances, lead handing to handle various scenarios like this needs to be sophisticated and nuanced, yet often these next steps aren’t documented for consistent follow-up. If there’s no documented process, there’s simply no way to create consistency, onboard new salespeople or scale your teams. It means that you’re leaving revenue on the table every day.
Technology Disconnects: CRM systems nearly without exception are typically underutilized, overcomplicated, used inconsistently or fighting against your process instead of supporting it. We’ve seen companies dump one CRM for a new tool thinking that will improve results. It never works that way.
People Misalignment: Here’s an uncomfortable truth that people don’t like to say: many B2B salespeople don’t like to sell. That doesn’t mean they’re not great at relationship-building with existing customers. But that’s not the hard work of “selling” and prospecting for market share growth and new customers. The fact is that some people are wired to be farmers, and some are wired as natural “hunters” who thrive on finding new customers. Both are valuable, but you’ll never grow market share and your customer base by putting farmers in hunting roles and suffering through the ongoing frustration of why your sales aren’t growing.
A little tip: there are personality assessment tools that can help teams identify “farmers” and “hunters.” One consultant for such a tool told a story about an underperforming sales team that did not bring in enough new customers. After conducting personality testing, they were stunned to learn that their entire sales team was filled with only farmers. No wonder they weren’t experiencing the prospecting they needed to grow.
It is nearly impossible and frankly impractical to try to rewire someone to adopt a new personality. Hunters enjoy the challenge of finding new customers without being burdened by the frequent rejection that accompanies this task.
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For too long, marketing jobs have been defined as “generating leads and handing them to sales.” That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. The most effective B2B marketing operations do three things simultaneously:
- Build Brand Recognition Before the Sales Call
When prospects have already heard of your company, the sales environment shifts. Cold calls became warm conversations. Phone messages are returned. Website form fills increase. That’s not magic—that’s marketing doing the work of lowering sales resistance before your team even picks up the phone.
Today’s B2B buyers complete 60-70% of their purchase journey ever before contacting sales. If your brand isn’t visible during that research phase, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Marketing’s job is to make sure your company is part of the conversation from day one.
This process of building brand recognition prior to the sales call plays an increasingly important role in an environment where buyers today have honed their skills of hiding from salespeople. Many work remotely and are out of reach of office phone numbers. Additionally, younger decision makers don’t place the same value on face-to-face meetings that older decision makers, such as Baby Boomers, do.
- Create Sales Enablement Tools That Actually Help Close Deals
A CEO once said to me, “all I need to sell is a data sheet and feet on the street.” Those days are long gone.
Generic product brochures don’t close deals anymore. Your sales team needs content that educates prospects, addresses specific objections, and moves opportunities through defined stages. That means:
- Industry-specific case studies that prove ROI
- Technical documentation that answers engineer questions
- Comparison guides that position you against competitors
- Nurture sequences that keep your brand top-of-mind during long sales cycles
At GGC, we’ve seen the impact when marketing embeds discovery questions and closing frameworks directly into CRM systems. Suddenly, the sales team isn’t just tracking data—it’s following a process that that’s repeatable, proven and helps seasoned sales teams sell more with less effort.
- Power a Lead Machine That Delivers Quality, Not Just Quantity
Here’s where most B2B marketing falls short: turning leads over to sales that aren’t sales-ready or fit the Ideal Customer Profile. How frustrating! It creates an endless cycle of lack of trust among salespeople for the entire marketing opportunity-generation process. We’ve all seen it and frankly salespeople aren’t wrong—marketing hits their lead targets while the sales team complains the leads are garbage.
The solution isn’t more leads. It’s better leads, defined collaboratively between marketing and sales, and delivered through multiple channels:
- Paid search and social media that target buyer intent keywords
- Email workflows that nurture contacts until they’re sales-ready
- Content marketing that attracts the right audience organically
- Account-based marketing that coordinates outreach to high-value targets
The Infrastructure Question CEOs Must Answer
After working with dozens of B2B companies, we’ve noticed something: CEOs apply rigorous process discipline to finance, operations and manufacturing, but often treat sales and marketing as a black box. Many B2B CEOs, particularly those in manufacturing organizations, came up through product development, engineering or finance—areas where they have natural expertise. If sales is outside their comfort zone, they can struggle with understanding and improving that part of the business.
Sales and marketing deserve the same level of process rigor as the rest of the company. That means:
Documented Sales Stages: Can you explain, step-by-step, how a prospect becomes a customer? Is that process written down? Does everyone follow it?
Clear Lead Definitions: What makes someone marketing-qualified versus sales-qualified? Have marketing and sales agreed on these definitions?
Integrated Technology: Does your CRM support your process, or fight it? Can you see pipeline health in real-time? Are marketing and sales using the same data?
Measurement That Matters: Are you tracking metrics that drive performance improvement, or fringe metrics that look impressive in a PowerPoint? The only metrics that matter are quotes, opportunities and closed-won metrics. The rest are vanity metrics.
Making the Shift: From Separate Functions to An Integrated Engine
Here’s what integration actually looks like in practice:
Marketing creates the playbook for sales: Not just brochures, but discovery frameworks, competitive positioning, and objection handling built into the CRM.
Sales informs marketing messaging: Your sales team talks to prospects daily. They know what objections come up, what competitors say, and what finally closes deals. That intelligence should flow back to marketing.
Both teams share the same goals: Not leads versus closed deals, but revenue. When marketing is measured on quote flow and closed-won revenue instead of lead flow, suddenly everyone cares about the same thing.
Technology connects the dots: Your CRM should tell you which marketing campaigns drive the best opportunities, which content helps close deals, and where prospects get stuck in your funnel.
The Bottom Line
Growing B2B revenue today requires more than working harder. It requires sales and marketing operating as a single, integrated engine where:
- Marketing lowers the resistance before sales engages
- Sales provides intelligence that sharpens marketing
- Both functions follow documented processes
- Technology enables rather than hinders performance
- Leadership applies the same process rigor to revenue generation as they do to operations
At Goldstein Group Communications, we specialize in building these marketing engines for B2B companies. Whether you’re struggling with lead quality, sales enablement, or strategic direction, the solution usually isn’t more activity. It’s better integration. Marketing can help sales.
Ready to build a marketing engine that actually drives sales results? Let’s talk about your specific challenges and how an integrated approach could transform your growth trajectory.
