Should sales or marketing lead your growth strategy? [Template Included]
Scaling a business guarantees you have two things: limited time and limited resources. Growth is critical, but do you know what should be driving your go-to-market or growth strategy? At the bottom of this email, I've included a downloadable template that will help you determine it for your business. Let's get started.
I saw this post on LinkedIn from the VP of Sales at Common Thread Collective Aaron Warshawsky a few weeks ago.
I commented:
Let me tell you why.
Once a product is validated, a brand can pull two levers for growth: marketing and sales. In the pre-digital age, the lines between sales and marketing were more apparent, but now we have e-commerce companies that, in theory, don't have a sales team but are driving insane growth, and customer acquisition (or selling) sits in the marketing function. At QALO, we didn't hire anyone with a sales title until we decided to sell through retailers, and our team was making outbound sales calls.
In other industries, it's all about cold sliding into your DM's, setting up that initial sales call, and getting customers in the pipeline.
Conversion rates matter in both funnels, but truthfully, it's all a bit confusing. If you're leading a B2B (Business to Business) company or growing a D2C (Direct to Consumer) one, you may be wondering what role sales or marketing should be playing in your growth strategy. I will clear it up for you without taking any credit for this concept. Mark Leslie created it.
In 2003, Mark Leslie and his fellow professors at Stanford wanted the university to launch a new sales course to help founders aim more effectively with limited resources in a go-to-market strategy. Like us, they ran into the conundrum of should marketing or sales be leading a business.
They came to the conclusion sales and marketing are counterbalances. One needs to be the primary driver of a go-to-market growth strategy, and the less you leverage one, the more you lean on the other. Think of it this way,
If your company is sales-driven, marketing becomes a resource to serve the sales team.
Example: A B2B company that uses blogs and educational content to create awareness and equip the sales team responsible for outbound calls and sales meetings.
If your company is marketing-driven, sales becomes a resource that serves the marketing team.
Example: In direct-to-consumer e-commerce, increasing lifetime value (a repeat of that singular purchase) is how you win, so your customer service team becomes the "sales team."
"If you’re marketing-intensive, the product is bought. If it’s sales-intensive, the product is sold." - Mark Leslie
Based on their discovery of the role these two disciplines play, they created Leslie"s Compass. A framework that business owners can use to determine which should be leading their growth.
Here are the 7 questions of Leslie's Compass:
💰
Pricing - Is this a large or small economic decision for the buyer?
Marketing: $5 decision to be made on impulse at checkout.
Sales: Large commitment, high price tag purchases that customers will research extensively.
🌍
Market size (customers) - What is the quantity of needed customers? Do they find you, or do you find them?
Marketing: If you're selling a $20 product, you need a high volume of customers.
Sales: If you're selling $100,000 enterprise software packages you need far less.
🤔
Complexity - How complicated is the product for a customer to understand?
Marketing: A silicone wedding ring is not hard to understand.
Sales: I have no idea what's required to make a car.
🛋️
Fit and Finish - How easy is your product to use after it's been purchased?
Marketing: I know how to push the start button on the Xbox.
Sales: I have no idea how to install these solar panels on my house.
👥
B2C or B2B - Am I predominately selling directly to people or companies?
Marketing (D2C): We're selling to moms.
Sales (B2B): Fortune 500 companies.
🤝
Relationship - Do I measure successful customer relationships by transactions or longevity?
Marketing: They bought a pair of shoes. I hope they buy another.
Sales: We need to sign a one-year contract.
🥊
High touch points - How much control do you have in developing your relationship with your customer? Can your efforts compound like with a sales cycle, or are they mostly one-off, like with click-through on ads?
Marketing: I ran ads on TikTok and sold a fidget spinner.
Sales: I know his wife's name, his kid's names, his dog's name, and this is the 12th steak dinner I've bought him.
The illustration Mark Leslie and his team created below shows the counterbalance of sales and marketing. Your company should land somewhere on it based on your answers to these questions. Below, the graph shows extreme examples of marketing Crest toothpaste versus selling an airplane engine.
I stumbled upon this approach while putting together a presentation for selling at startups, and it gave me so much clarity. After reading it, I created the downloadable template below for you to use to ensure your strategy for growth is the right one with examples of well-known companies:
Leslie's Compass Framework Template
In the example with Aaron above, lead generation can be the result of marketing efforts such as SEO and paid search, but it is then passed to a sales team. With the sales-led approach of the agency and the outbound effort listed in the experience required, I hope now it makes sense why I responded to Aaron's question the way I did.
