And if you can find a sales team who doesn’t want a marketing team to do that, then I’m stunned. That’s what every sales team is begging for from their marketing team, just that honesty, that transparency.

And your sales team is going to say: ‘Hey, we want this email promoting the upcoming trade show.’ Great, make them the email. These are not binary. This is change management, this is growth over time.

So you go through, you define the personas. You go through, you define your funnel stages. You go through, you create your content. And you pick a spot: we’re going to focus on lead gen.

So yeah, I built sales their trade show promotion email. I built sales their end of quarter special email. But I also took the 98 percent of my leads that have no meaningful engagement, the lists that I’ve acquired over the years, and I started lead generation email and PPC ads, and social media ads, and I started targeting this group with the content that I developed in parallel to the things I was already doing for sales.

And it is, by giving sales what they need to keep functioning today, and coordinating and organizing this larger overhaul and then implementing that, spend a quarter, spend two quarters building it and deploying it slowly, a piece at a time.

And ‘Ah, I don’t have a lead gen problem any more. The leads I’m generating aren’t converting fast enough. Now, I have a lead nurture problem.’ And then spend your next quarter or two quarters building out your lead nurture process.

This isn’t an overnight thing. This is a massive shift in the way marketers think. And it takes time for leads to bake, so keep doing the things you need to do for your sales team, and then start taking this one bite at a time.

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