How to Solve B2B Sales an Marketing Alignment Problem

Dorien Morin-van Dam: What really breaks down collaboration between sales and marketing, and how do you fix it for real?

In this week’s episode, I am joined today by B2B strategist and author Pam Dner. She will reveal what happens when teams misalign, how to rebuild trust among team members, and why shared KPIs aren’t enough. We’re diving deep into the mindset, structure, and culture needed to make revenue teams actually work together and how AI will affect and change the way we collaborate. This is Strategy Talks. I’ll be right back.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Strategy Talks.

I am so excited to be here today with Pam Didner, who we’re going to talk about collaboration between sales and marketing. Yes, whether you’re on team marketing or team sales or team revenue or team owner, I don’t care. This is going to be amazing. I want to welcome all of you here live with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and those of you who watch this show on replay. Quite a few of you do that every week.

Last but not least, I want to welcome those of you who listen to Strategy Talks as a podcast. We appreciate you. We see your numbers each and every week, and we’re very excited that you take the time to listen to this podcast. So, I’m going to introduce you to my friend Pam. Hey, Pam. How are you today?

Pam Didner: Dorine, thank you so much for having me. Oh my god, I love that jingle. That’s the first time I heard it. It was so cute.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: I know. I love it, too. My son wrote it, composed it and sang it for me, and it’s been on the show for almost four years, and it’s not going to change right now. I love it. So, yes.

Pam Didner: Mother and son collaboration. All right. I like that a lot. I like that a lot.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Yes. So Pam, I’m gonna go right into it, right?

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Why many companies keep sales and marketing teams away from each other, whether that’s by design or accident, I don’t know. But this is what we’re going to talk about today. Why they should be working together and how to do it in a way that feels good and yields results for all the teams. So, before we dive in, why do you think it’s 2025? Why is this still happening? Why are we doing this?

Pam Didner: Well, I really think that sales and marketing, we all have a different mindsets and sales tend to focus on the middle of the funnel and the marketing tend to focus on top of the funnel and uh we tend to focus on more brand awareness and demand generation and the sales is about let’s close the deals, let’s close the deals, right? So I think the mindset is a little bit different and on top of it, the marketing people tend to focus on let’s build a relationship and let’s nurture right our prospect and the sales people it’s about relationship building as well but at the same time like what okay we can build a relationship but at the same time do we have do you have a budget do you need a tools right now.

Should we talk? They are more like a hunter’s mindset, right? If they’re hunting something, if it’s not going anywhere, they are going to move to a different target. So I think the mindset and also how we approach the prospects tend to be a little bit different.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Do you also think that from the top down, the C-suite influences how sales and marketing communicate with each other? Do you think that still influences that?

Pam Didner: Oh yes certainly you know a lot of time especially in any companies doesn’t matter it’s a small companies mid-size company or enterprises I think the C-suite behavior does impact in terms of how workerbees like us behave so if the VP of sales and also CMO or even CEO they talk to each other all the time in a very close alignments and you will see sales and marketing also in a close alignment. However, if the VP of sales and the CMO tend to do their own things, then you kind of see the two organizations do their own things. It’s not necessarily good or bad.

Honestly, it really depends on the company culture. I have known several companies, especially in the manufacturing segments, where the sales and marketing don’t really have any kind of overlapping communications, but in the past three or four decades, they’ve been working pretty well. But I also have noticed that with digital marketing right now, when everything is connected, everybody’s on the phone all the time, and the customer journeys from one stage to another tend to be interlocked and interconnected. In certain segments, the sales and marketing collaboration really needs to happen. If it doesn’t happen, it creates a gap in terms of the customer experience.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: And it can impact revenues directly.

Pam Didner: Correct. 100%. 100%. And a lot of time, when you are looking at it in terms of sales, and you know this pretty well, you have the prospect coming to the door, right? And then the marketing will probably do the initial qualification. Then you move on. You pass that baton on the sales side, and then the sales team schedules the meeting. But every single touch point, there’s always a chance that the prospect is not going to convert.

And so you have to really understand the transition from the sales to marketing and also even from marketing to marketing or sales to sales.

How can we keep that conversation and engagement going?

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Yeah, that is so good. It’s so important. So I’ve kind of done some research on the things that you talk about, and one of the things you’ve spoken about is that marketing needs to adopt a mindset of helping sales win. And then in your experience with doing that, what’s the most counterintuitive thing that you’ve seen marketing do that actually inhibited sales rather than helped them? And how did you flip it?

Pam Didner: That’s a great question. I don’t know if it’s the counterintuitive things that they do. It’s more or less like the mindset that you need to have. I indicated that a little earlier. It has something to do with, okay, we have a list of marketing content. If we created a blog post, we created an ebook, and we actually have a podcast, kind of like what you have. We have tons of content on the marketing side, and the marketers probably know all these pieces of content; how does that fit into the customer journey?

Okay, it’s probably very intuitive for a lot of marketers. But when you share the content, a lot of the time, the salespeople will say, “You know what? I’m sending an email out.” They don’t talk that way, but I do. “We are sending an email out. I need some content to attach to part of my email.” And that’s great. But the thing is, instead of sending the salespeople a list of marketing content, why don’t you classify the content that you have into sales stages, not customer journey, but sales stages? How the salespeople actually move for their prospects alone. Is that helpful? So classify the content in the way they understand.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Oh, that’s even better.

Pam Didner: That’s right. So you build kind of like a little table. It’s a cheat sheet. A lot of times, some of the companies actually have the sales content management library. So, in a sales content management library, you can identify different sales stages to tag them for all your content pieces, but sometimes you don’t have that. If you don’t have it, can you create a little cheat sheet for your salespeople and say Hey, if you are doing this, these are the types of content you should use. If you are doing that, these are the types of content you can use. So give them a little bit of guidance. Actually helps tremendously.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: That’s wonderful, and I’m thinking,  I’m a content strategist, so I’m thinking, frequently asked questions, how do we work with you and research that we’ve done, case studies, right?

If you put them in the right space, then the sales managers or the salespeople can just grab that and attach it, and then they own it too, because that’s the other thing that I’m hearing you say, instead of marketing serving it up and saying, “Here you go.” If it’s available to a sales team and they get trained on that, or they have that cheat sheet available, they can make the choices, and then they’ll start seeing results from giving the right prospect the right content, I’m assuming.

Pam Didner: Yeah. And then nowadays, you can even use ChatGPT or an AI bot to help you. You can actually have a list of content, upload it into Chat GPT or even an AI bot, and it just basically specifies, you know, what is your recommendation. You can ask AI, you have your own point of view, and it’s definitely right. You can also ask AI how you would structure and recommend in terms of how these different pieces of content fit into different sales stages.

Of course, you have to share and articulate your sales stages with a ChatGPT or AI bot and see what your recommendations are. At the same time, have your own point of view, right, not just take what AI said blindly, but have your own point of view and make adjustments, and hopefully by doing that, it saves you tons of time instead of classifying and thinking it through.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: That makes a lot of sense, so Pam, we’re talking about businesses, brands, B2B, maybe even B2C, that have sales teams. Is there a difference between having a small team? I’ve been on teams where I’m the only marketer. I’ve been on teams where, you know, they have only one or two salespeople, but then there are teams where you have hundreds. Is there a difference in how you would facilitate? If you go into a company and you help them make that connection, is there a difference in how you facilitate or how you would move that along between a small team and a large company that has lots of people?

Pam Didner: So the way I usually address that is for a smaller team, if you are a one or two-person marketing team and you are supporting, say, 10 salespeople, if you think about that, the ratio is really 2 to 10 or 1 to 10. So that’s very manageable. However, most of the time, even in the bigger enterprises, the number of salespeople versus the number of marketing people tends to be a much bigger sales team than a small headcount of the marketing team. That’s always the case.

I don’t think I have ever run into any organization that actually has a marketing headcount that’s bigger than sales headcount. Never. I don’t think so.

So, usually, the bigger sales team and a smaller marketing team.

So the way I usually look at it is the ratio between the two. So if one to 10 or even 2 to 10, that means it’s a 1:5 ratio. That’s not bad. But a lot of time in a bigger organization, it tends to be 1 to 80, for example. Does that make sense?

Seriously, it’s a much bigger sales team and a smaller marketing organization. In that specific case, you have to think it through in terms of, like, okay, if you are one marketing person and the ratio between one marketing versus sales on the sales side is substantially higher, there’s no way you can support all the salespeople. What you need to do is kind of determine that you have to work on the sales side, right?

You need to determine whether you can support them based on accounts instead of the number of salespeople. Is it possible that you can support the high-revenue or high-impact strategic accounts? That’s number one. And number two is you have to scale.

Let’s assume you are one person who has to support the southeast region of the 80 salespeople. Then you have to think through, like the stuff that you share with them, can that be standardized, or can you teach them how to fish? Right? A lot of time – trust me, I work with tons of salespeople – they were like, just give that to me. They don’t talk that way. I do.

So instead of giving them something, you can tell them you’ll give them something that’s semi-standardized, and you have to tell them you need to actually make some modification. So, when you support that many salespeople, you cannot customize all the time.

So you have to think it through in terms of the number of people you support and can you prioritize. That’s number one. Or if you cannot prioritize and you have to support everyone then you have to standardize it.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: I love that answer. Oh wow, that’s like my brain is thinking like I have a couple of clients. I’m like, oh my god, this is great. This is really going to be helpful. So let’s talk AI. You wrote books about using AI, right? Generally, AI is out there. How do you foresee the role of human sales marketer partnerships evolving with AI in there? Will there be collaboration between sales, marketing, and AI? Will it be better? Will it be worse? What’s happening?

You’ve got your books right there behind you. Modern AI marketer. Let’s talk AI and sales and marketing teams.

Pam Didner: So, first of all, I just want everybody to know that I write small books. This is like only 100 pages. And the way I tell people about reading this book is you can read this book and watch Netflix at the same time.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Does it have a good index? People can scan it.

Pam Didner: You’re just like, you know what? And everybody was like, “What chapter should I read?” I was four, five, and six. That’s it.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Okay. Well, you know, that’s great. I wish I had a book. I don’t have a book yet. So, I totally admired that. That’s awesome.

Pam Didner: It’s a lot of work. Trust me, it’s not worth it.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: You didn’t hear that here.

Pam Didner: I think it’s not worth so much time writing it. That’s my point.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: So now let’s come back to AI marketing. Yes. How do we integrate that? Will it cause a divide? Is it bringing people together? How can we use it? And how is somebody that’s a CMO, that’s an owner, that’s watching this, listening to this and saying, “We’re bringing in the AI tools. We want our teams to be closer. What are things that we have to be careful about that we don’t do?”

Pam Didner: Very good question. So there are a couple of things I want to say. First of all, remember I always come back to a mindset. From my perspective, everything we do, we need to have a certain kind of mindset. And for AI, I always encourage my clients to have the mindset that if they have any questions, go ask ChatGPT first. That’s the mindset. By the way, I’m not asking you to rely on Chat GPT.

Remember, nowadays, in the past 10 years, where have we go? Google. Best restaurant near me, you Google. And, or you have like what is ABM, you Google, right? So what I want my clients to do, or any of you who are listening, is change their mindset a little bit. Instead of googling, can you also go to ChatGPT and ask the same question?

I’m not asking you to rely on ChatGPT heavily. No, I’m only asking you to change your mindset, change your behavior a little bit. If you are intimidated by it, that’s the first step. Okay? But if you are using it on every single day and the Chat GPT or AI buys are your BFF, okay, fine. Your mindset’s already changed. Great.

The number two is I want to make sure everybody understands, and I heard this from Andy Christina, and I think it’s great. The answers provided by the bot are recommendations. They are not a panacea. Please don’t take everything they said as if it were “yes, it’s true”. No, it’s not.

You need to have a point of view. You need to be able to read it and have it, then be able to judge. It’s like, okay, this is somehow on the right track, or it’s completely off. That’s number two.

So, number three is don’t blindly copy and paste. Please don’t do that. Even though you are asking Chat GPT to write an email, and you said in Pam Dinner’s tone and voice, that’s great when you read it, see it as a first draft, and you need to edit it.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: I’m gonna add to that, you need to push back. I just did a newsletter on LinkedIn. And I’ve uploaded like 20 newsletters in my own voice and I’ve I’ve used it you know it’s like the newsletter bot that I use and you know I pick a topic I say this is what I want to talk about and today it’s spit out something that was not sounding like written at all I’m like you know what this is not good you go back and you read all the instructions and all the old newsletters and make it sound like me I don’t mind doing editing because I will do editing but this is not me at all – and it was like oh you’re right.

Pam Didner: So I actually had just shared exactly a similar story, and when I was writing this book, I really wanted to be lazy. I don’t want to write this book. I was like, that’s too much work, and actually hired a developer. I’m not kidding. I paid this developer like money, and I said you and I are going to work on the prompts together, and we are going to upload tons of my stuff. I want AI to write this book because I’m going to say the author is AI. I don’t care. You know what I’m saying? It’s just like, yeah, whatever. So, we tried for four days. Really tried different prompts, tried different things, uploaded different files, and we tried an AI agent. We also did various LLMs – forget it.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: It didn’t sound like you at all.

Pam Didner: It doesn’t work. No. So I have come to realize that I am the one who still has to put the skeleton of the book together. I need to do the outline. But they are very good at editing, say a paragraph at a time. But in terms of like the whole book or even a very specific chapter, not so much, not my standard because they can write. I mean, I’m not saying AI cannot write, but the problem is that they put so many flowery words together.

When you read it, there’s no substance. You are the writer. You know exactly what I’m talking about. There are a bunch of words they add together. It sounds like, oh my god, it sounds like, oh, you know, stuff. And then you read it, you’re like, what? This is the emperor without clothes. I know.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: You need to write a book about that next. That sounds like a great book to read. Oh, I love that. That sounds like a wonderful experiment.

So, AI using teams. So, when you go in, and you do trainings for sales and marketing teams. Yes. Do you? I’m just curious. I don’t know the answer. Do you help them set up bots? Do you tell them to share bots? Do you like how you do it? How do you tell them to share tools? What are some of the things that you do to help them move forward, and that AI can help them with?

Pam Didner: Great question. Most of my AI training is 100% customized and tailored based on that company’s needs.

So, in general, I have conversations with their CMOs and also the marketing directors, and they will tell me specifically in terms of how they are using AI or not using AI this time. And then I will build the AI training based on that. And like many enterprises, the only AI tool they can use is Copilot.

They cannot even use ChatGPT. They can only use Copilot. Copilot is embedded in the Microsoft Office suite. So if you actually have a paid version of it, you will see Copilot as a part of Excel. You will see Copilot in the upper right-hand corner as a part of PowerPoint or as a part of Outlook. And a lot of the time, the marketers don’t know how to use Copilot in every single application. Then my job is kind of like showing them how they can use that effectively. That’s number one.</p>

Number two is in my current training, which is still very much focused on the individual level. How everyone can prompt effectively? How you can use Copilot more effectively within the Microsoft Office applications. So there’s still a lot of that, you know, kind of trying to get themselves ramped up, and then of course, now everybody’s ramped up, then you can look at the AI at the team level. Then, that’s what you have to look into.

Okay, can you create agents yourself? If the agents you create are very good, can that be shared within the team? That will be the next level. And then, of course, the level after that is you look into the workflows, and then you create agents to do certain tasks and automate that workflow. That’s the next level. So there are multiple stages. But at this point, many organizations are still in the first phase and a little bit in the second phase.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Yeah. And I have a side question for you because this was fascinating to me that I was at a conference um this summer and they had a panel about AI and somebody threw out the statistics that 70% of employees are bringing AI to work and that a lot of employers have no idea because they have chat GPT on their phone in their pocket and they’re using it for work but they don’t have AI policies surrounding that. When you do these trainings, is that what you find? You’re focusing on the individual, and do people confess like, “Oh, yeah. I’m already using it. I have it on my phone.” Or do you really go into, you know, this is for the brand, this is how we do it, and you know, put that phone away kind of thing.

Pam Didner: So, it really depends on companies. There are many companies whose cultures are very conservative. So if you work for companies that are very conservative, you know that you cannot cross the line. Does that make sense?

So in that situation, a lot of companies will just be a lot of employees who say we don’t have a policy yet, and the company kind of says we cannot use it, and they don’t use Chat GPT for work-related purposes. They still do it for personal usage. And any company that basically said you can only use Copilot, they already have an AI policy in place because they say you cannot use anything else, you can only use Copilot.

And many, many enterprises actually initiated, and they have a conversation with employees or send out a newsletter and let everybody know that they can only use Copilot. I have at least five companies reach out to me and say, “Can you do AI training for us”? The only tool we can talk about is Copilot, nothing else. So it depends on the companies, and my thought is you kind of know what kind of company you work for and with, and in terms of corporate culture, you can gauge whether you should do it or not.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: So that makes a lot of sense. So I have one last question before we break. We’re already at 25 minutes. I could talk to you for another hour, but here it is: if marketing and sales had to switch roles for one quarter, same goals, same tools, same internal pressure. What do you think each team would finally appreciate about the other that they’re missing right now? Because sales think they’re the bomb because they make sales, marketing thinks they’re the bomb because they, you know, do the nurturing. What do you think would happen if sales and marketing teams for a whole quarter were to switch?

Pam Didner: I think they will find that each job, both sides’ jobs, are kind of challenging in their own ways.

Like, can you imagine marketers close deals, and they have to meet quarterly and monthly? I think that’s going to stress marketing people out. They were like, “What? I only have 30 days, and I have to meet a revenue target. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.”

And then the salespeople on the other side were like, “I don’t understand. It should not be that hard to write this blog post, right? I don’t know why it’s taking you guys five days to write it.” And then when they started writing, they were like, “I don’t know what to say.” You know what I’m saying? So I think having them swapped is not necessarily a bad thing, but you will kind of have a chance to feel the pain points of each other. Hopefully, by doing that, we will not do that in real life, but understanding that will actually help them to work closely together.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: That makes sense. Awesome. So Pam, where can people connect with you if somebody wants AI training? If they want to know more about what you do, and if they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m on a sales team, and I don’t really have any idea what marketing does or I’m on a marketing team, and I really need to make one of these, you know, checklists for my sales team. How can people connect with you, and where can they find you? Where are you visible online?

Pam Didner: I’m actually on every single channel, including TikTok. So, I do my dance. All right, I’m kidding. I don’t dance. I’m not very good at it. I try. All right. And I don’t mind embarrassing the heck out of myself. Long story short, I’m on every single channel, and I’m probably most active on LinkedIn, like other business professionals. And I also have my own website.

So you can reach out to me on my website, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, or any other channels, honestly. The bottom line is, I know how hard it is to be a marketer. I do. And I also know how challenging it is to be a salesperson. If you need a therapy session, just reach out to me on LinkedIn. We can talk. And you can also chat with me, you know, like send me an email, and I’m more than happy to address any questions that you have.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Awesome. And I know that you also speak at conferences. Are there any upcoming conferences that you’re going to be at where people could potentially find you?

Pam Didner: I do a lot of private enterprise training. So, if you need that, reach out to me anytime. I will be at the B2B forum in November, and there’s a B2BMX in March. There are other conferences right now I’m in the process of discussing, and hopefully, if you sign up for my newsletter or if you follow me and connect with me on LinkedIn, you will see where I will be.

Dorien Morin-van Dam: Perfect. Perfect. I’ll make sure to link everything in the show notes that you can connect with Pam. Thank you so much for staying with us all the way to the end. I appreciate all of you being here. Pam, thank you for your time today and your expertise. I love this conversation. I’ll be back next week with another episode of Strategy Talks. Bye.

Pam Didner: Thank you so much. Take care. Bye-bye.