Many B2B marketers struggle with departmental disconnects that leave potential revenue on the table and create frustration across the organization. But what if there was a way to break down these silos and transform them into powerful revenue-generating engines?
In this episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse, our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton talks with Anatole Ashraf, a seasoned senior marketing leader. His experience at LinkedIn and BNY Mellon has given him unique insights into orchestrating marketing success across organizations.
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When have you seen departmental silos impact business results?
Anatole Ashraf: Absolutely. At a financial services firm, in the past, I’ll try not to name names, but something public, right? Something that’s hundreds of years old naturally will create teams in various silos.
So, in this previous experience, the main problem was no one knew what each other did. Especially between sales products on the internal side, no one knew what marketing did. Ultimately, on the sales and business development side, marketing didn’t know what business development was up to.
I’ve also seen this in various organizations, I’ve seen this at series D startups and at SaaS products, [or] anywhere that’s big enough, but also small enough.
But, at that financial services firm, that breakdown in communication was the main effect of all these silos. No one knew what anybody else was doing. It led to poor lead quality, misaligned messaging, virtually no lead handoff. There was no real process for that. And no visibility, ultimately. The way we solve that: The short answer is a CRM, right? The single source of truth is Salesforce. Once we got everything functioning and plugged in and working properly and ultimately getting visibility, shared visibility across teams. That’s when we were able to start solving some of those problems.
What are the first signs indicating marketing isn’t aligned with other departments?
Anatole Ashraf: Once you start hearing those questions, like “What does marketing do?” or like “Why is marketing sending me crap leads?”
Once you start hearing those grumblings, that’s when you know something’s off or in a more specific way— let’s say, in Marketo or HubSpot or whatever marketing automation the CRM tool—for me, it’s normally in HubSpot or Marketo, one of those tools where I’m seeing all this great information, right? Somebody’s opening every email they’re clicking, the click-through rate is high. And their lead score is on the upper threshold. Like, this is an MQL, this person’s great. From my perspective, this is over to the lead owner. This is over to the contact owner. They must be having a great conversation already. And then you’ll go in and see, wait, there’s no lead activity. There are no emails. What happened? That’s one way to prove and start seeing these problems. But, of course, you want to catch it before it gets there.
Those grumblings, those conversations that’s usually the first clue. Of course, on the marketing ops side, the best way to catch it early is to build up as many automation tools or something like that. I’ve also had alerts set up.
If the lead score is high enough, right over time, it’ll decrease. And if you do things like setting up alerts like that, [it] tracks negative engagement, too, then hopefully you can also start to catch that stuff, but also the way they do it without technology is conversations, listening out for those grumblings.
Mike Allton: So, there are two huge takeaways already for those of you listening.
First, every leader in every department of the organization should be keeping an ear out for when folks in your department start to complain about other departments, right? If you’re leading a product team, that’s fantastic.
They start wondering what marketing is doing and that sort of thing. Those are red flags that there’s not enough communication happening inter department.
Second, a huge takeaway is to make sure that you’re using a CRM and a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, Salesforce, and so on, and you’ve got automations set up to automatically score leads.
You need to be paying attention to [whether] they’ve downloaded something, how many pages they visited, how much time they’ve spent on site, and use those built-in tools to calculate. The more somebody does, the more time they spend on your pricing page than on your services page.
Obviously, that means there are more and more of higher intent. You score that appropriately and then make sure that there’s automation going on. That’s notifying your sales department. Hey, we’ve got someone more than just kicking tires, they need outreach and have set up alerts to your point that let folks know that this is happening.
If somebody hasn’t been followed up on all that can be automated with some help from your ops team. But let’s suppose, you’re a leader in one of these departments and you’re starting to hear some of these grumblings. And so you are either an executive position or at least a department leader.
How do you start to initiate the process of breaking down silos?
Anatole Ashraf: Whether the goals have increased, or there are revenue challenges or market cap challenges, etc., it’s usually something like that in my experience. That’s the big problem that necessitates a change management procedure, but once you get to that why, just communicating that has been very essential to me. Of course, it’s a whole bunch of meetings and a whole bunch of conversations—but when people understand the goals and how it impacts them whether it saves them time, saves them money, saves them efforts, affects their bonuses, then the collaboration becomes a lot easier.
It can be as simple as setting up calendar invites and Outlook or whatever, but beyond that, it’s just working together on shared goals, defining KPIs, defining what good looks like, or the timeline that you’ve set up for yourself, and then just having a plan to start plugging along.
I’ve also seen success when it doesn’t seem like something huge. It doesn’t seem like a tremendous obstacle to, let’s say, inputting everything into Salesforce into these changes in habits. If you can break that down for people also, that’s tremendously helpful. There’s always some adjustment required, but once you make that seem achievable, seem manageable, and tie it into people’s bonuses, that’s when they start listening to you. That’s when I feel like the collaboration starts.
Are there tools or solutions you’d recommend that you’ve seen help people achieve success in this area?
Anatole Ashraf: Some people use technology as a crutch, but when it works well is when the tools are something that doesn’t have too high of a learning curve, especially if you’re starting from scratch.
Anything that has too high of a learning curve, or it’s too outside of someone’s regular workflow, there will be resistance, right? And, of course, you can deal with setting up training and documentation, having all those resources at hand, or setting up more meetings to walk somebody through how this works but find something that isn’t too high of a learning curve and increased adoption, then you can start making inroads towards the goals.
In marketing, there’s a tremendous amount of tools for every kind of problem trying to solve. From a change management collaboration, marketing ops process, Salesforce is Salesforce for a reason. And it’s crazy [and] remarkable to me how many organizations are still a little behind on Salesforce.
Like, whenever I have sales acquaintances or colleagues join Salesforce as sales leaders, there’s always a question in the back of my head: Who still needs to be sold Salesforce? But yeah, they’re out there, plenty of organizations. Is the answer big and small, across the spectrum, there is Salesforce, there’s HubSpot, [and] that’s another great CRM tool? I’ve used HubSpot primarily as a marketing automation tool.
There’s HubSpot, there’s Marketo, and these are just some of the basics, right? You need a CRM tool for your contact management. You need a marketing automation tool that plugs into the CRM. Everyone across the, everyone who needs it has visibility, various teams, and functions …
Another tool that’s not quite in the business development, sales, and marketing alignment side but can have a very positive effect there, I found it to be a CROS. The experiential marketing tool helps you build really nice landing pages and then plugs into everything from Salesforce to even a LinkedIn campaign manager with an API, of course.
And something like that is super helpful for sending some of the Google Analytics data. Some of the in-the-weeds data is into the contact record, then that sends it into Salesforce. So folks on the sales side of the business development side start to get a flavor of the kinds of things that marketing is up to. Like, we’re out here building landing pages. We’re out here driving traffic to all of these things. We’re out here helping boost conversions and then getting you those names, getting people to raise their hands. These are some of the ways we do it with tools like these. You can not only send the whole picture or send a more of a complete picture of what your contact is doing but also what marketing is doing. This is why we’re here.
This is why we get paid because we’re helping you with all of this intelligence, with all of this air cover to ultimately help sales or business development, move the needle for the business.
Just some of the tools that I’m a big fan of. Of course, there’s a ton more other stuff, but those are some of the tools I keep coming back to, especially something that folks on the sales and business development side can understand.
Like, in the EOS system, every meeting is based around headlines and issues, mostly issues, what are your problems that you need help working through, which makes a lot of sense, but those don’t address inter-team communication at all.
Following the EOS framework, how are teams going to communicate?
Anatole Ashraf: KPIs are a huge one, especially with the OKR framework.
Sometimes even KPIs are relied on too much, almost like a crutch. I’ve been thinking about this recently more on the marketing side, right? Like, metrics overall, right?
A lot of what marketing does has metrics. This is something, especially if you come up from the digital marketing world. I got my start back in 2008 as a blogger, when in the Wild West of digital marketing as a content writer, and we were singing the metric song very loudly back then. That got formalized in the craft and the discipline, and it worked its way up as a foundational way of doing digital marketing.
Of course, that was one reason why digital marketing became the delay of the land because you could track everything, you could plug everything into the business but especially with AI and the changing landscape of not only just SEO but changing consumer habits, like folks don’t read blogs the same way, right? Yes, there are hundreds and thousands of websites being created every day, but they’re not being interacted with the same way, right? From a brand perspective, not everything needs to have a metric.
Not everything needs to have a KPI, right? Nor should it.
For example, in the past, when I was at Relationship Science, it was like a relationship mapping tool, right? It showed you who your strongest connection to a prospect was. We had a big fan in Andrew. He’s a thought leader, he’s got a show on CNBC. The last name is escaping me, but he was a big fan of the product. He used it, and he wrote about us a couple of times in the New York Times. He just wrote about his favorite tools and he mentioned us. Relationship Science has also been acquired since then, but every time he mentioned us in the New York Times, who will never give you a backlink, right?
So it’s the bane of SEO everywhere. Like, why won’t you give us a backlink? But every time it did that, just our organic traffic. Shot up to the roof and that is brand air cover, right? So yes, it’s important to be able to tell that story. It’s important to be able to draw the correlations, but yeah, some things you just want to, from a brand perspective, not necessarily a digital marketing demand generation perspective.
You just want to put it out there. You want to put it out there and then let us let it do its thing. So, coming back to the OKR framework, if you draw it too strictly, you can’t show those wins. You can’t show when something in the wider world has gone right or gone wrong for you, and you can’t react to it effectively.
So overall, you don’t want to draw any framework too strictly, there’s got to be room for flexibility and got to be room for iteration, especially the more legacy the company, the more of a challenge it can be.
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Share some of the things that we’ve been talking about, folks are better aligning, they’re communicating, and that’s led to some unexpected positive outcomes.
Anatole Ashraf: At a small B2B Ad tech startup where I was in around 2016, it’s been one of the biggest wins of my career as well. I led the performance marketing at that organization tasked with driving high quality pipeline growth. I owned all the paid earn. We had a separate team but owned and paid was within my purview.
All kinds of digital channels along with the marketing operations as well. So, when we got everything working, and when we got everything set up and got all the campaigns ready, sales, and business development alignment, the conversions were the easy part. We targeted the S&B market.
For me, the S&B market is almost like a B2C, direct-to-consumer mindset, direct-to-consumer play. So, the volume and the conversions, that was the easy part. The hard part was the qualification, the market operations, and making sure the business development side was aligned. That they knew as soon as somebody filled out a form, we had the nurture campaigns ready to go. So we did a lot of great stuff along those lines. So it was like the greatest hits. So we had a healthy testing budget. We had Marketo integrations. We migrated the website. We used a service at the time as well. And we kept a tight eye on performance budgets and costs. And we had as much automation as possible built out to move all that along.
That led to the high intent leads significantly lowered customer acquisition costs, boosted conversion rates, and boosted meeting rates as well.
It was really cool that some folks would just come over to me and say, I’ve been chasing this person this tier one, top tier target firm. I’ve been trying to get a meeting at this company for the last six months. And I finally got it. And then not only that they call me. So you rarely hear somebody on your prospect list, calling you, especially on the SaaS side. Hearing those stories was great. We even ended up hiring more folks, more SDRs, more customer success folks, based on the business that campaign and all that work were driving, so it was effectively ABM before ABM became a buzzword as well.
That’s a formative experience and it shows you what good looks, like what you’re trying to achieve with sales and business development and marketing alignment. Of course, you can’t forget product as well—especially in the SaaS world.
So when you have product and operations and of course, sales and business development all working together. When you use technology correctly, you prove the whole process, and you show what good looks like.
What are common pitfalls to look out for when trying to unite all these different departments under one goal?
Anatole Ashraf: I think the biggest challenge is trying to do too much too soon. People are busy, people have their main jobs to do sometimes.
Even if part of their job is to work with you on what you’re trying to achieve trying to inject yourself into that workflow, it needs to be done correctly. A steady pace with wins communicated along the way, that’s the way where you make this change last … So training them all up, building automated workflows, and ultimately taking the time with them to make them comfortable with the new way of doing things while also managing their time, right? You want to make sure that you’re not filling up their calendar with meetings on just this when they have all the other stuff to do by being respectful of their time …
And then also building in the time, in whatever change management project to train folks correctly it’s super key. So yeah, just building in, especially if you have the luxury of time, right? Not everybody, not every organization is going to have the same timelines or be able to do some of this, but if you can effectively build in the opportunity for learning, understanding—and, of course, retention in a way that fits into folks’ regular workflows—and, so if it’s not too much of an ask, that’s how you achieve lasting change, in my opinion.
Do you see a particular role(s) within an organization that should be primarily responsible for this kind of intercommunication?
Anatole Ashraf: It could be a sales enablement manager or something like that where their job is to effectively connect what marketing’s doing with sales.
There are some great sales leaders at LinkedIn who show me what great looks like in this role, and then what you could also have—this is just me if I was creating an org chart where money is an object where having that sales enablement manager as counterpart on the marketing team. So, those two folks can make sure that everything is connected. Everything is communicated. Those two folks are like the connective tissue and, of course, here you have some organizations that have to have a separate data team. Some organizations have a separate marketing ops team, but having roles like that, whose sole responsibility is to make sure that various stakeholders understand what’s happening, understand why, and have visibility into the day-to-day and, of course, have healthy feedback loops. You want to avoid that situation where marketing is saying, “Sales can’t close leads I give them,” and sales are saying, “Marketing is giving me crappy leads.” Having that focus and having that work covered, that’s great.
There are many other functions, to build up in my fantasy org chart—fantasy football exists, but fantasy org chart should be a thing—but that marketing ops sales enablement focus or discipline would be really cool.
It already exists in some places, but if we could wave a wand and create that role at every B2B organization, I’d be super happy.
How do we keep that momentum going in those positive directions?
Anatole Ashraf: Automate, automate. Keep sending automated reports. Automated notifications.
Arcado, for example, has an interesting moments setting. And that’s just a really dumbed-down way of saying, “Use those notifications and then keep sending them to folks.” One way I’ve done this is within Salesforce, I’m setting up dashboards that show people how things are moving along, and all the wins along the way.
It shows trends, especially, and you also have to meet people where they’re at. Some people respond pretty well to dashboards. Some people need the squeaky wheel, pestering them about, “Hey, have you seen this? Have you seen this?” Some people love having a life—whether it’s email alerts or a dashboard that they can just consult at their leisure.
But, beyond having those automated notifications and tools ready, regular check-ins are super important. Some people may be annoyed by that. You gotta power through, right? Especially if you, at the beginning of the process, if you’ve communicated that why, then the meetings are easy.
There’s also reporting fatigue. Depending on how far up the senior individuals are dealing with, essentially meeting people where they’re at for not only their immediate remit but also giving them visibility into the overall movements and to things like: How are opportunities moving down the line? How are leads moving down the line?
Giving people the opportunity to engage with that intelligence as they need to, as they see it. But also building in the discipline of: Here are the meetings, here are the touch points, here are the check-ins.
That’s how we’re gonna keep moving it along. If I were to break it down into two things, regular calendar invites, regular meetings, and automated alerts as much as possible provided, you’ve built the foundational stuff the right way.
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