Sales vs Marketing

Who’s Really to Blame for Falling Short on Orders in Your Business?

The never-ending blame game between sales and marketing continues, but let’s be honest—when a company fails, it’s usually because both sides dropped the ball.

The reality is that both sales and marketing are often at fault—it’s time to wake up and smell the roses: a more integrated approach between the two is essential for success.

Let the debates begin, and I will try to balance why both are equally important.

Let us Begin With Marketing

A spicy take is, “If sales aren’t succeeding, it is marketing’s fault.”

Is marketing getting the sales team in front of the right potential customers?

Are they giving the sales team a seat at the table to secure more work?

Is marketing creating a positive sentiment surrounding the brand to enable sales to close deals?

But the real question is: Is marketing allowed to do its job?

Are marketers allocating sufficient time to create content that addresses all psychological aspects of selling through marketing?

Why is Psychology Important in Digital Marketing?

These key psychological triggers can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your marketing by appealing directly to your audience’s core motivations:

Harnessing Fear: A Powerful Psychological Tool in Digital Marketing

Harnessing fear in digital marketing involves tapping into users’ anxieties or concerns to create a sense of urgency. By addressing potential risks or highlighting the consequences of inaction, marketers can motivate users to engage, driving conversions and immediate action.

Fear-based headlines often invoke a sense of urgency or concern, prompting people to click to avoid missing out or to protect themselves from potential harm. For example, “Are You Making These Common Mistakes?” capitalises on the fear of doing something wrong.

Leveraging Desire: Fuelling Engagement Through Aspirations

Leveraging desire in digital marketing means appealing to your audience’s wants, whether success, wealth, or happiness. By aligning your messaging with their aspirations, you can create compelling offers and content that drive engagement and motivate action.

Desire-driven headlines tap into what people want: material possessions, knowledge, or emotional satisfaction. An example could be “Unlock the Secret to Financial Freedom,” which appeals to the desire for wealth and independence.

Sparking Curiosity: Engaging Audiences Through Intrigue

Curiosity in digital marketing involves crafting messages that create an information gap, enticing audiences to click, explore, and learn more. By piquing interest without revealing too much, marketers can drive engagement and encourage deeper interaction with their content.

Curiosity-inducing headlines create an information gap, where readers feel compelled to click to satisfy their curiosity. For example, “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next” entices the reader to learn more.

Leveraging Social Proof: Building Trust and Credibility

Social proof in digital marketing uses testimonials, reviews, and endorsements to validate your brand. By showcasing others’ positive experiences, you can build trust and credibility, encouraging potential customers to follow suit and engage with your offerings.

People are more likely to click on something if they see that others have already engaged with it positively. Headlines like “Join 10,000 Happy Customers” leverage social proof to attract clicks.

Creating Urgency: Driving Immediate Action

Urgency in digital marketing involves using time-sensitive offers and limited availability to encourage quick decisions. By instilling a fear of missing out (FOMO), marketers can prompt faster conversions and motivate customers to act without delay.

Urgency encourages people to act quickly, often by implying a limited time frame. Phrases like “Last Chance” or “Only a Few Left” create a fear of missing out (FOMO), driving clicks.

Stirring Controversy: Capturing Attention and Sparking Debate

Controversy in digital marketing can be a powerful tool for capturing attention and generating discussion. By presenting bold or unconventional viewpoints, marketers can engage audiences emotionally, drive high levels of interaction, and increase brand visibility.

Controversial topics or opinions can provoke strong reactions, leading people to click out of a desire to engage, agree, or disagree. Headlines like “Why Everything You Know About X Is Wrong” spark debate and clicks.

Establishing Authority: Inspiring Confidence and Trust

Authority in digital marketing is about positioning your brand as a credible and knowledgeable leader in your field. By showcasing expertise and authoritative content, you can inspire confidence and trust, making it easier to influence your audience and drive conversions.

People are inclined to trust and click on content that appears to come from a credible or authoritative source. Headlines such as “Expert Tips on…” or “According to Scientists…” invoke a sense of trust.

Utilizing Scarcity: Motivating Purchases Through Limited Availability

Scarcity in digital marketing taps into the fear of missing out by highlighting limited quantities or time-sensitive offers. By creating a sense of exclusivity, marketers can drive urgency and encourage customers to make quicker purchasing decisions.

Scarcity creates a sense of exclusivity and prompts immediate action. Headlines that include “Limited Edition” or “Exclusive Offer” tap into this principle to drive clicks.

Each of these elements works by tapping into psychological triggers that compel users to click through to satisfy a need or resolve emotional tension.

The psychological triggers can significantly improve click-through rates or attract engagement to your branded properties.

The Problem With Marketing Strategies

Too often, marketing teams are forced to act as “pseudo sales teams,” focusing solely on in-market buyers. This ignores the massive untapped potential of 95-97% of your target market that isn’t ready to buy yet.

Those actively seeking to make a purchase represent about 3-5% of the total target market at any given time. The remaining 95-97% of the market consists of potential customers who are not yet in the buying phase but could be influenced through brand-building, education, and nurturing over time.

This larger market portion is often called “future buyers” or the “latent market.” Marketers’ key challenge is to engage and nurture this majority to move them closer to making a buying decision when they are ready.

Provocative Stance on Marketing

If the marketing team is empowered to do their job, they should be held accountable for sales hitting their quota as well.

To drive home the point that marketing is the true culprit behind sales failures, consider these critical factors where marketing often falls short:

• Marketing’s failure to consistently create opportunities leaves the sales pipeline dry, directly undermining revenue growth.
• By neglecting to engage buyers before they’re ready, marketing misses crucial chances to shape purchasing decisions early on.
• When buyers don’t trust the company, it’s because marketing has failed to build a compelling and trustworthy brand reputation.
• A lack of authority and credibility in the market clearly indicates that marketing is not effectively leveraging owned and earned media.
• Marketing must bear the blame when sales targets aren’t met—if sales falter, it’s proof that marketing hasn’t delivered.
• The root of sales issues lies in marketing’s inability to generate enough opportunities and support, exposing its failures in enabling success.
• Marketing’s obsession with short-term wins leaves the vast majority of the market untouched, squandering future sales potential.
• When sales falter, it’s because marketing has failed to dominate the category across search, social, and news—proving that a weak brand presence is marketing’s biggest mistake

The Provocative Stance on Marketing makes a compelling case for a more integrated approach between marketing and sales.

It challenges traditional roles and encourages a broader view of marketing’s responsibilities.

The tone might be polarising, particularly for salespeople who feel that their challenges are being overly simplified or who believe that sales issues can also stem from factors outside marketing’s control.

The Problem With SalesPeople

The problem with salespeople is that they’re quick to latch onto any excuse that absolves them of responsibility when deals fall through.

Whether it’s blaming slow lead generation, poor marketing materials, or unqualified prospects, they rarely look in the mirror.

It’s never their fault when they fail to close a deal—there’s always something or someone else to blame.

This mindset prevents them from recognising their own shortcomings, such as failing to respond quickly enough, not being prepared, or neglecting to truly understand the customer’s needs.

We strongly recommend you read these 4 articles related to sales:

• Best Practices to Respond to Leads: This guide runs through all aspects of improving your cold lead to a conversion
• Impact Of Lead Response Times: Responding to leads quickly improves conversion significantly
• Nurturing Leads: Lead nurturing strategies are a huge element in converting leads and creating long-lasting customer relationships.
• Reasons We Decline Lead Gen Customers: We get asked 100 times daily to supply leads for UK businesses, and here is why we decline more than 50% of these prospects

Most failing sales staff take zero ownership; they hide behind excuses, avoiding accountability for their own performance.

Provocative Stance on Sales

To emphasise that blaming marketing for sales failures is a weak excuse, let’s consider where sales often fall short:

• Blaming marketing for a dry sales pipeline? It sounds like an excuse. If salespeople can’t turn opportunities into closed deals, perhaps they should reconsider their approach instead of pointing fingers.
• Marketing didn’t engage buyers early enough? Maybe sales should step up and start building relationships instead of waiting for leads to be spoon-fed to them.
• Lack of trust in the company? A skilled salesperson can overcome objections and build trust on the spot. If that’s not happening, it’s a sales issue, not a marketing one.
• Authority and credibility lacking? Sales professionals are supposed to be the face of the company. If they can’t establish authority during a pitch, it’s weak to blame marketing.
• Sales targets not met? It’s convenient to shift blame to marketing, but a true salesperson takes ownership and finds ways to succeed, regardless of the circumstances.
• Not enough opportunities? Maybe sales should focus less on what’s lacking and more on maximising the potential of every lead they do get. A weak closer will always blame a lack of leads.
• Short-term focus? Sales needs to adapt and work with the hand they’re dealt. Great salespeople don’t whine about short-term marketing strategies—they turn them into long-term relationships.
• Marketing failed to dominate the category? Or perhaps sales failed to seize the opportunities and make an impact in the market. It’s easy to blame others, but great salespeople make their own luck.

This counter-argument challenges the notion that sales failures are solely marketing’s fault and provocatively asserts that strong salespeople take responsibility and make success happen, regardless of external factors.

Summary

This type of content can drive strong arguments, particularly among marketing and sales professionals who are invested in discussions about alignment and accountability.

It is clear to see that a more integrated approach between marketing and sales is needed to succeed.

When business owners do not give marketing teams enough time, they create a “pseudo sales team” that forces marketing to directly drive short-term sales outcomes rather than building long-term brand awareness, generating leads, and creating demand.

Focussing solely on in-market buyers may drive immediate sales. Still, it limits marketing’s role to short-term support, neglecting the larger opportunity to build brand recognition and generate long-term demand.