Your Allies

Experienced marketing professionals - we lead, we do, we mentor

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‘How to forge more collaborative and successful teams…’ Your Allies leads the conversation on team alignment at Lyreco’s launch Hub event.

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As a friend of Lyreco, Your Allies was delighted to be part of the launch event. Our founder, Linsay Duncan, was one of three speakers, and shared insights and practical takeaways on ‘sales & marketing alignment – lessons to apply across your business’. 

Watch the full 15-minute video on sales and marketing alignment basics

Drawing on her 20+ years marketing experience Linsay dove into the people-side of making team alignment happen. The importance of having a shared vision, effective collaboration processes and the social side of things featured in her talk.

“When Lyreco invited me to speak about team collaboration, it was an immediate ‘yes’. I’ve seen what good can look like, when sales and marketing teams are joined up, and want to bring that to wherever we work. So often I see businesses with robust sales and marketing alignment plans in place, with sophisticated technology backing the teams up. But the basics around getting the people-side of things working are often neglected and as a result those initiatives never quite fly, and never have the same impact. It’s our mission to help businesses get those people-focused basics in place.” says Linsay.

A great turn-out. Useful quotes were dotted around the room.

The two other speakers joining Linsay on stage were Elise Finn and Will Higham.  Elise, a business and personal coach, discussed the challenges of the Imposter Syndrome, offering up ways to improve ‘your future self’ by conquering what is holding you back. 

Will, who is a leading authority on innovation and strategy, divulged key findings from his recent report on ‘The work colleague of the future’. Whilst it largely paints a bleak picture of tomorrow’s workplace, Will pointed to many ways in which people can start working smarter and healthier. 

Networking and conversations lasted well into the night after the presentations, and Lyreco will be making the speaker content available soon. We’re looking forward to the next one already. Check out the Lyreco Hub website for more details.

Meantime, if the subject of Sales and Marketing Alignment has sparked some interest, you can read more about the challenges businesses are facing and some of the ways to tackle them in our Smarketing series. 

Two years on the trot, Your Allies wins ‘Best in B2B Marketing’ at Corporate LiveWire Awards 2019

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“Best in B2B marketing is a badge we’ll wear with pride. It’s this expertise that the business was founded on, 9 years ago, and what we wanted to be valued for. Industry recognition like this is a real boost for the team and I,”

says Your Allies founder, Linsay Duncan.

Key to our win: marketing and sales alignment

We doubt very much that we’d be celebrating a win if it weren’t for our focus on sales and marketing alignment. Our B2B marketing support goes hand-in-hand with helping clients get their sales and marketing teams working like a well-oiled machine. Even with the best B2B marketing strategy in the world, if Sales haven’t fed into it, aren’t on board with it and aren’t prepped to follow-up on the leads it generates, it’s not going to achieve its full potential. 

What’s next?

The Your Allies Team will keep on doing what it’s been doing. That means staying tuned into the B2B world, to the latest marketing research, stats and benchmarks, and of course our clients’ world. Growing our ABM capabilities remains a focus too, as more and more we help bed down these initiatives between sales and marketing for our clients. For certain business types, we’re finding that the right ABM strategy can can be a real game-changer.

Sales Vee Marketing

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You’d be hard pushed to find a wittier, shorter and more excruciatingly caustic summary of the marketing vs sales situation than this off-the-cuff but bang-on-target explanation by Gary Vee (or Gary Vaynerchuk, as he’s known when not online).

It’s worth hearing it again. As he cracks heads together, he outlines the main beliefs, attitudes and values that have driven a wedge between those in sales and their next of kin in marketing. Very quickly he slips into the persona of a coach offering a dressing-room dressing-down of a disunified and poorly performing football team.  

Let’s turn the hair-dryer on.

‘Sales and marketing orgs hate each other because they have different objectives.

Salespeople… 

In just one move your marketing team can change everything for you: one activation at a conference, one video for Facebook, one sponsorship.

They’re like Mike Tyson – one punch and the job’s done. And there’s nothing salespeople can ever do to match the impact of one killer marketing campaign.

Marketers… 

You’re full of shit, you’re fluffy and you’re highbrow. I don’t care about your degrees: most of the stuff you do doesn’t matter.

You preen and pout like prima donnas while sales graft, day in and day out, to clean up all the mistakes you make. 

They don’t have the luxury of a budget – and you have one that asks for no quantifiable evidence of success. They can’t say to the CFO, ‘Well, the long-term impact of that conversation I had will be blah, blah, blah’. 

They simply have to make sales. And everyone just looks at their closing numbers without giving them any credit for the set-up.

The long and short of it, ladies and gents, is that we need to get our team completely aligned to create a cohesive unit.’

Sales and marketing alignment – Are we there yet, or is it proving a bridge too far?

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Rose-coloured boardrooms

It seems the Holy Grail of productive relationships between sales and marketing continues to elude us.

  • Most of us are by now talking the talk, but are we walking the walk?
  • How far have we come?
  • And are we nearly there yet?

Here’s a revealing snapshot.

Source: HubSpot

Nearly a third of C-level execs feel that their marketing and sales teams are tightly aligned, with consistent sales and marketing objectives – and over three-quarters of them are collectively patting themselves on the back for being, at least, generally aligned.

But, take a stroll down from the boardroom to the shop floor and you’ll hear a different story.

Here the managers and team members have a much less optimistic assessment. Only 17% feel they are tightly aligned, while over a quarter reckon they are, at best, rarely aligned.

It’s an instructive mismatch.

The more senior you are the more you feel your job is done. 

Would it be fair to suggest that those employees that need to deal with issues concerning marketing vs. sales on a daily basis may have a more accurate assessment of the state of play?

A bridge too far?

We’ll get a more objective feel for the lay of the land in a minute when we consider the results of a 2018 survey of UK B2B sales and marketing teams by sales enablement agency Bridge.

It’s the latest health check of B2B sales and marketing we’ve come across – and it’s refreshingly UK-centric. 

Its findings broadly replicate the suggestion that we are far from there yet that has emerged from surveys taken in recent years by HubSpot, Green Hat and Aberdeen. All point to a persistent divide that still exists at the level of culture, values, organisational structure, working-styles, goals and metrics.

Has nothing changed at all?

Rebecca Bell, Board Advisor at Bridge, looks at the depressing results of this latest survey and manages to find a small glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Looking on the bright side she recognises that now sales and marketing understand that they need each other.

But a quick glance at the survey results leads her to add:

‘But do we trust each other?

Nope.

There is a genuine absence of a relationship between the sales and marketing functions.

Is this simply the type of dysfunctional relationship you come to expect between close siblings who have no option but to co-exist within the same family? 

Or is it something more important? 

Something that’s holding back critical business growth?

Aligning sales and marketing strategically, and tactically around joint purpose and success is the only way to drive growth and realise return from investments in both people and programmes.’

But it’s yet to happen: it seems we’re still chasing that Holy Grail – and here’s what’s leaping out of Pandora’s box right now.

Sales teams continue to see little value in the support they receive from marketing.

Their judging panel gave a measly 5 out of 10 for their colleagues’ performance. 

(Marketing teams showed more love, with an emphatic Len Goodman 7.)

Nearly 60% of UK marketers still feel sales teams are not ‘using what we give them’.

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Almost 40% of marketers have no idea how many people they need to engage at the top of the funnel to generate enough qualified leads for the sales hit squad.

What’s more, only 14% have a clear idea of their current cost per acquisition.

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Even at the bottom of the funnel confusion reigns. 


More than half of all marketers admit they don’t understand what content and marketing support is most effective during the final stages of the sales cycle.

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Only half of those surveyed sometimes collaborated across departments to define how leads are defined and qualified.

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More than half of B2B marketers have no clue about their sales team’s close rates.

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Nearly 70% of marketers claim to share their findings about audiences and buying personas.

But only just over 30% of salespeople can remember this happening.

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Source: The sales and marketing divide – Fact or fiction?

Are we there yet?

It seems we are still far from aligning sales and marketing strategies.

In the next posts we’ll take a step back to remind ourselves how we got into this situation.

And then, after that, we can explore ways to get out of it once and for all.

SMarketing – Holy Grail or Pandora’s box?

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Marketing and Sales alignment has been on the agenda since at least the start of the millennium.

Jeez, time sure does fly when your teams are at loggerheads!

  • It has been nearly 20 years since we first witnessed the convergence of online search, content marketing, social selling and the emergence of the ‘educated’ buyer. [link to post]
  • That’s two decades since the first clarion calls were heard urging us to create a new B2B sales and marketing model that fought the good fight under the unified banner of smarketing.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge – but sales and marketing are for many businesses still only linked by the weakest of bridges straddling some very troubled waters.

It’s true…

SMarketing has, in many ways, become our Holy Grail, with its promise of a deep and shared understanding of the customer, a set of clearly-defined shared goals and significant revenue growth as a result.

And yet…

Positive relationships between sales and marketing have proven to be something of a Pandora’s box: the more we open it, the deeper the issues we need to address appear. 

Is it proving to be a bridge too far?

a bridge too far?

That’s exactly what we’re looking to answer in this series of digestible insights, articles and commentary from some awesome B2B professionals. 

  • We’ll analyse what the underlying issues are.
  • Reveal how far we’ve travelled.
  • And start to plot a way forward by keep building those bridges.

You’ve nothing to lose but your market share and profitability.

And, yes, it can be that serious if SMarketing is neglected – so stick around – this is going to be a journey well worth taking. 

Here’s the route we’ve got mapped out for you. 

  1. Sales and marketing alignment: Are we there yet, or is it proving a bridge too far?
    What is the state of play? Here we set out how sales and marketing are looking through a tonne of research. Knowing what you’re facing, is essential before you set out to build your sales and marketing dream team.
  2. Sales vee marketing
    We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. So we’re not. We break down how Gary Vee, in his own unique style, gets right to the guts of the matter. Prepare for an entertaining view. 
  3. When balls-out boys met the tits and teeth department
    Here we explore the labels sales and marketing get stuck with, and where these stereotypes stem from. Understand the beast, and then you might know how to tackle it.


Why should you listen to us?

With 20 years of experience behind all of our marketing directors, we’ve seen SMarketing done well – and we’ll share with you how to achieve it.

We’ve stepped in to situations where marketing was the poor neglected child in the corner, bullied by sales – and we’ve built the team up to be a credible, high-performing part of the business. 

We’ve also been asked to help out where a marketing team was not doing its job in supporting sales – and we’ve turned things around. 

Now we’re putting all of our experience into this insightful series of articles – so you can do the same.

You’ll hear from some other brilliant bods too

We’ve also tapped into the real-life experiences – good, bad and ugly – from our network of peers. 

You’ll benefit from the first-hand experiences of those at the front-line, as they share actual examples of SMarketing wins, failures and learnings. 

What can you do with all this SMarketing learning and insight?

  • You will take away industry benchmarks from established B2B sales and marketing professionals to share within your business.
  • You’ll be able to demonstrate to your boss exactly how it can work – and you’ll have tangible examples of what SMarketing looks like and what it can achieve.
  • You’ll gain a vision of what can be that will excite and enthuse those around you.
  • Most importantly, you’ll understand exactly how to start making SMarketing happen.

Read the first in the series – Sales and marketing alignment: Are we there yet, or is it proving a bridge too far?

Your Allies joined the Plogolution!

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Your Allies and Plogolution at Bedelsford School

What is a plog? An amalgamation of the Swedish word ‘plocka’ and ‘jogging’. It roughly translates to running while picking up plastic and rubbish. Seriously smart as it addresses an environmental issue whilst helping people keep fit. And with Britain getting more and more obese, we need this more than ever before.

It was unquestionably something we wanted to be involved with – Your Allies strives to be allies with great people and organisations.

On a cold and wet December day, Your Allies’ founder, Linsay Duncan, joined forces with the delightful pupils of Bedelsford School, and took to clean the streets of Kingston, London. “It was rewarding to see them so passionate about their local environment and for us, incredibly motivating to be part of educating young children about our planet,” said Linsay.

Michelle, co-founder of Plogolution adds, “We are bowled over by the reaction we’re getting. The coverage we’ve had in the press – including the Sunday Times, Evening Standard and Heart FM – along with the involvement of schools and businesses like Your Allies, is so crucial to our concept working.”

Plogging is the kind of forward-thinking initiative we massively support. It perfectly fits our ethos at Your Allies. We are fit, active people who want to contribute positively to the world we live in.

Find a plog in your area and get plogging yourself!

Contact

hello@yourallies.co.uk