How to Hire a Marketing Agency Your Sales Team Will Love

Hiring a marketing agency can be stressful, as the agency you choose is often perceived as a reflection of you. But will sales be frustrated with your choice? And can you trust this agency to deliver results without having to micromanage them?   

This new agency partner should be a huge win, taking pressure off your back and helping your marketing and sales departments to align – ultimately producing more revenue and higher ROI.  

This article will help you make that happen. It provides everything you need to understand what often goes wrong when hiring a marketing agency – and ensure you select one that your sales team will love. 

Expect to learn:  

• The real reasons companies still make bad marketing agency hires 
• The full range of benefits an ideal agency hire will offer 
• The three skills every marketing agency should bring to the table 

Why is Hiring the Right Marketing Agency Difficult? 

3 Common Complaints from Sales  

The easiest way to understand the challenge CMOs and other marketing leaders face when hiring a marketing agency is to look at the issues sales teams most frequently raise:  

1. Poor Lead Quality  

The most common complaint from sales teams is that their marketing agency produces low-quality leads, which means a lot of time and effort is wasted chasing buyers that were never going to make a purchase.  

A recent survey found that sales teams believe just 44% of MQLs are actually a good fit, and this creates a lack of trust between the two departments.  

2. Lack of Knowledge 

Many sales teams also feel their marketing agency does not have the depth of knowledge required to effectively nurture leads. While sales teams must have extensive conversations about specific product features or industry challenges, marketing agencies often “get away” with producing generic, low-value content that doesn’t resonate with the buyer’s real pain points. 

This has several negative effects: 

• The business misses the chance to build authority 
• The buyer is less aware of the business’s offering(s) 
• The sales team must spend more time educating and nurturing the lead

All of which leads to a longer buying process and a lower chance of closing a deal.  

3. Process Misalignment

Sales and marketing alignment is difficult enough with in-house teams; LinkedIn studies suggest the average targeting overlap between sales and marketing teams is just 16%. This problem can often be exacerbated when one party is a third-party vendor. 

The complaints are numerous and varied, including: 

• Misaligned incentives: Marketing agencies want to produce a high volume of leads and may not worry as much about the quality. 
• A lack of unified strategy: Marketing agencies may be brought in for short-term tactical purposes, which means they are not fully onboard with or aware of the longer-term strategy. 
• Poorly executed handoffs: There is not an established handoff process to smoothly move leads from marketing nurture to sales outreach, which often means sales does not know how to follow up in the most appropriate and effective way. 

Why Do Bad Hires Still Happen? 

These problems have been widely reported for a long time, with extensive research on the importance of sales and marketing alignment. Yet few businesses seem capable of fixing the issue and hiring an agency with which their sales teams enjoy working. 

There are few key reasons for this: 

1. Focus on Performance, Not Process 

Agencies are routinely hired based on their previous performance or client list, with relatively little consideration of their processes or how they engage with sales. While CMOs need to be assured the agency can produce results, it is equally important that they are a cultural fit for your business - and know how to collaborate with sales. 

The best agency is not always the one with the most industry awards or recognizable logos on their website; it is the agency that is going to enable your sales and marketing departments to work together effectively toward a shared goal of increasing revenue. 

This is often a question of process: will the agency spend enough time getting to understand your business and internal processes? Will they customize their approach to meet your goals? And will you get their full focus at all times? 

2. Short-Term KPIs 

Hiring an agency is a big investment, which means CMOs must be able to effectively measure the return and determine as quickly as possible whether to retain the agency. But this leads to an overemphasis on short-term results that may not be in the business’s best interest. 

Lead quality is the obvious example here: Agencies are routinely tasked with increasing lead generation, with their performance measured primarily on the volume of leads generated. But from sales’ perspective, this often leads to less emphasis on quality and more lax qualification processes. 

What Does Sales Want from a Marketing Agency?  

3 Qualities Every Sales Team Values in an Agency Partner 

While B2B industries vary wildly, there are a handful of factors every sales team hopes for when you hire a marketing agency: 

1. Direct Communication 

Agencies tend to communicate exclusively with the marketing department, but this means sales is often unaware of what the agency is producing. As a result, sales teams may not make full use of the content marketing generated - and certainly won’t be able to help shape the messaging or topics being covered. 

Sales teams want a marketing agency that will proactively seek to collaborate with them. Even simple things, such as asking sales for insights to help generate content, can dramatically increase alignment and improve relations between the two parties. 

2. Sales Enablement

83% of chief sales officers (CSOs) believe their team is struggling to adapt to their buyers’ changing needs and expectations. An external agency should be a vital resource in this regard - but only if they consider it one of their responsibilities. 

Sales teams want a marketing agency that makes sales enablement a core part of their strategy. This ranges from creating collateral tailored to concrete pain points to developing automated email sequences that sales can leverage at specific points in their selling process. 

3. Revenue Focus 

The true purpose of all sales and marketing teams is to increase the company’s bottom line. But many agencies are only interested in maximizing the KPIs they are judged on in order to ensure they keep their retainer. 

Sales teams want a marketing agency that puts revenue first. Lead generation would be a simple example: Is the agency willing to be rigorous in their quality control, even if it means missing their KPIs? And does the agency go out of its way to measure and optimize the impact its activities have on actual revenue generation? 

How Agencies Can Support Sales and Marketing Alignment 

All three of the qualities listed above boil down to one concept: sales and marketing alignment. Companies that succeed in enabling the two departments to work together smoothly are 3x more likely to exceed their customer acquisition targets – but most organizations still struggle to make that a reality. 

The right marketing agency can support better alignment in three important ways: 

1. External Perspective 

Internal marketing and sales departments are knee-deep in their existing processes. This means they have grown accustomed to processes or practices which are not conducive to strong alignment - and may actively harm their performance. 

A marketing agency can provide the external perspective needed to fix these problems. From gaps in the funnel to miscommunication between the departments, the right agency will have the knowledge and skills to identify the factors that hold your performance back. They should then also be able to adjust existing processes and, when necessary, introduce new ones that will help you generate more revenue. 

2. Tech Enablement

Sales and marketing alignment is often limited by technology. Data silos make it hard to establish a shared view of the buyer journey; communication silos make it difficult to share insights; and a lack of automation means both departments waste valuable time on repetitive manual processes. 

However, an agency may bring expertise that will help you fix these problems and adopt better solutions. This could range from leveraging sales and marketing automation that makes lead handoffs more efficient to overhauling and enhancing your CRM to establish a unified view of the customer. 

3. Process Planning 

The right agency will include sales in their strategy and develop processes to enable ongoing collaboration. This can include: 

• Aligning Campaigns: Ensuring every marketing campaign aligns with the larger business objectives. 
• Funnel Mapping: Revising your sales and marketing funnels to align more effectively and reflect your ideal buyer journey. 
• Lead Reviews: Establishing a methodology and regular cadence to assess lead quality and follow-up and improve lead generation over time. 

How to Find a Marketing Agency Your Sales Team Will Love  

3 Key Specialisms to Look For  

The quickest way to identify an agency that will truly support sales is to look for a few key specialisms: 

1. High-Value Content

Virtually every marketing agency produces “content” of some kind, but the devil is always in the detail. Many agencies produce content that fulfils the goals of marketing well – i.e. it produces plenty of leads. But they often achieve this using cheap SEO tricks that produce low-quality leads – and therefore ultimately waste sales’ time. 

The takeaway is simple: you need an agency that produces content that actually helps buyers understand their industry, challenge and vendor options. This is very different to low-value SEO content, and instead relies on: 

• Extensive research into both the industry and buyer 
• Ongoing effort to align with sales around the key pain points to feature in content 
• Content strategy that factors in the needs of both marketing and sales

 2. RevOps 

Virtually every agency will claim to care about ROI, but few really have expertise in optimizing spend and processes to grow your bottom line. Revenue operations (RevOps) does not have to be an agency’s sole offering, but they should have expertise in: 

• Funnel mapping 
• Lead scoring and review 
• Sales and marketing automation 

All of these practices can be baked seamlessly into a “standard” agency engagement - and ensure everything being produced by both your internal teams and agency partners generates more revenue.  

3. CRM Optimization

The bare minimum expectation should be extensive experience using CRMs, but ideally you want an agency that can help you optimize and, if necessary, migrate your system. This means you will be better equipped to store and leverage data across both sales and marketing campaigns.  

How to Assess a Prospective Agency  

While the specialisms listed above are important, you also need to carefully vet any prospective agency. The following questions will help you quickly understand how an agency collaborates with sales and whether they are likely to help improve sales and marketing alignment: 

• How do you ensure content is relevant and valuable to both marketing and sales? 

• What is your methodology for lead scoring and lead review? 

• How do you ensure regular communication with sales? 

• How do you include sales within your campaign planning and strategy? 

• Can you give concrete examples of how you have improved sales and marketing alignment for other companies? 

Find the Pain Points that Hold Back Sales with ProperExpression  

After helping over 50 B2B companies leverage RevOps to drive faster, more reliable revenue, we have seen every kind of sales and marketing misalignment – and know exactly how to resolve it.  

In just 15 minutes, we can start to identify the process, tech or cultural factors that could be creating friction and leading you to leave money on the table. 

Want to learn what’s holding your sales team back?