“We’re not trying to teach salespeople French, we’re trying to get them to use a French accent,” shared a CMO from a $350mil software company. Explaining the metaphor, this CMO said, “Helping Sales understand the customer better is a nuanced exercise!”

Grab your passport, Marketing’s complicated relationship with Sales is an ever-challenging adventure.

When Sales Stumbles, CMOs Are in the Crosshairs

Let’s start with a pragmatic CMO. They know with absolute certainty that when Sales miss their revenue target, Marketing will be blamed. Anticipating this, they build a “demand-generation machine” that delivers the requisite number of qualified opportunities (SQO) per sales rep. In the CMO Huddles community, that average is roughly 5 SQOs per rep with the expectation that these reps would close deals at least 20% of the time.

Unfortunately, Sales reps on average are closing about 17% of the time these days. Yeah, I found that number hard to believe, too.

Our pragmatic CMO will spot these lower close rates and attempt to increase their coverage to 6 SQOs per rep. That’s a lot of "opportunities" to get into and squeeze through the pipeline. Especially with the same skimpy budget. And there’s this truth - if the CMO knew how to deliver more opportunities they would have done so earlier.

Fixing the Crisis of Low Close Rates

Enter our linguistic CMO. They start with the obvious, “Our close rates suck” and set about to help their partners in Sales fix a common problem–youngish sales reps often struggle to relate to their customers and their challenges. Thus the teaching of the “French accent.” You may not be able to teach your sales reps to speak fluent “customer” but you can help them with the nuances. And who better to share customer insights than the marketer who makes knowing the customer a top priority?

If you can’t relate to your buyer, your close rates will suck. Period.

There’s a lot more to this story, some of which I can cover in this post. Close rates are abysmal for a combination of reasons. The main question here is what can a CMO do about it? Regular readers of my Saturday editorials won’t be surprised that I suggest starting at the strategic level.

Building a Differentiated Brand to Close More Deals

A differentiated brand makes the buying decision easier.

And a better-known brand is almost always easier to sell. Omar Akhtar, founder of Benchmarker, and former Altimeter analyst, has done extensive research on this point. He notes in their Benchmarker 2024 B2B SaaS Benchmarks Study, “Companies who spend less than 10% of their revenue on marketing have worse conversion rates across every stage of the marketing funnel.”

Final Thoughts

CMOs know they need to help salespeople in all the ways they can. Their jobs depend on it. Teaching salespeople the nuances of the customer is an unquestionably worthy pursuit. But that’s just the crust of the baguette, n’est pas?

Written by Drew Neisser