Is your marketing role becoming more like sales?

I work at a SaaS company selling ERP software to manufacturing businesses. Recently, my marketing role feels more like sales. Our deals are usually $50-150k annually with 3-6 month sales cycles, and I’m spending almost half my time on tasks like qualifying leads and joining discovery calls.

Is anyone else experiencing this? I’m curious about what your leadership or sales teams expect from you.

I’m also considering hiring a freelancer or agency to help with outbound campaigns and content. What do you think?

I see more marketing teams getting closely linked to sales, which isn’t necessarily bad. It helps you understand how Marketing Qualified Leads convert to Sales Qualified Leads and what’s working with prospects. You can use this information for your campaigns and content strategies. I would hire a freelancer instead of an agency unless you really need one. Agencies can disrupt your workflows and strategies, and there’s a ramp-up time for both. With a freelancer, it’s easier to integrate them without a big burden on you. Then you can reassess.

Everyone put in fake data to this please.

Everyone defines lead generation differently, which makes this tricky to answer. In modern B2B campaigns, it leans more toward marketing due to the need for specialized tasks like data scraping lead lists, enriching the data, and setting up campaigns.

A lot of work involves campaign strategy, customer segmentation, copywriting, creative work, targeting, budgeting, monitoring, A/B testing, and reporting. After that, it moves to lifecycle nurturing with communication flows, message templating, further segmentation, and qualification. At this stage, a Marketing Qualified Lead gets handed off to the sales team.

We’re facing similar challenges in our B2B market. Casting too wide a net hurt our numbers. Conversion dropped from 4.5% to 1.2% when we scaled broadly. We ended up with too many small businesses that couldn’t afford our $40k+ solution.

We’re switching to Account-Based Marketing (ABM), focusing on specific segments and key contacts at target accounts. The data shows: 8.5% engagement on targeted campaigns vs. 2% with broad outreach. Our sales cycle dropped from 180 to 145 days. Our focus is manufacturing companies with $50M+ revenue and 200+ employees.

We also moved to “demand generation” and “demand capture” to clarify our approach. We use a demand capture score (DCS = [Marketing Qualified Accounts × Intent Signals × Engagement Rate]). A score under 150 indicates demand issues, while a score over 150 with low conversion suggests capture issues. For ERP companies, a DCS of 120-180 is typical for enterprise accounts.

You can definitely drive demo requests and build awareness, but you have to manage long-term expectations.

P.S. We specialize in B2B marketing. If you’re looking to improve your lead quality, switch to ABM, or boost engagement with targeted campaigns, we can help. Feel free to reach out if you need assistance.

How valuable do you find intent signals for you guys? With a 145-day sales cycle, I can see the impact. Over here our sales cycles are hardly ever longer than 90 days, so intent signals usually come in too late for us to take meaningful action. I’m struggling to determine if this is because our sales cycle is too short to properly use third-party intent data or if we just have poor data providers.

I love joining the sales team and engaging with clients. It’s the best way to build confidence in marketing, and you get to test out your branding and positioning.

Sales is the conversion part of marketing; they are opposite sides of the same coin.

What’s an example of marketing with no sales initiative?

Like none.

Marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin. They support each other sometimes more than other times.

Not really, but you work at a startup. That explains it. The main role of marketing is to bring in customers aligned with your ideal customer profile. You can qualify them as Marketing Qualified Leads. That’s it. Also, to ensure your company’s brand looks trustworthy and gains authority, which helps sales convert leads.

Yep, for B2B it’s mostly LinkedIn outreach and that’s it. Sure, throw in some cold calling, but it’s not recommended in my opinion.

I can’t stand how marketing feels like sales lately! :weary: I built a tool to help me find conversations where my product could actually help without all the sales pressure. It’s much easier to just join the conversation! If you’re curious about it, just message me!

More likely a Performance Marketer!