How to Stop Sales and Marketing From Blaming Each Other So Both Teams Actually Improve Close Rate

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When you’re scaling up to million dollar months, one of the worst things that can possibly happen is when you have sales and marketing start beefing with each other.

There is nothing worse than hearing your marketer complain that all sales people talk about is that leads are unqualified, that the leads suck, and the fact that the marketer’s just saying, “Oh, well, this whole thing’s not return on ad spend positive because of the closers.”

And then vice versa, when the sales team’s sitting there and blaming marketing for everything and they accept no accountability and there’s no improvement on either end of the spectrum, nothing improves.

So here I’m going to break down exactly how to overcome the marketer’s challenge and the sales team’s challenge to resolve this dilemma and make a team on both the sales and marketing side that can work together efficiently, effectively, and more importantly than anything else at a scaled up level.

So million dollar months are possible.

I’m not making any income claims here saying you’re going to read this and hit million dollar months or make any more money for that matter. As with any other content, all I’m doing here is handing down the top lessons from the currently forty one different businesses that have been there, done that, and hit their million dollar months and passing them down to you.

For all those new here, my name’s Jeremy Haynes, and that’s all we talk about around here. Our million dollar a month lessons, mainly what to do and an occasional what not to do.

For all those that are already following along, welcome back. It’s always a pleasure to have you.

So one thing that again just absolutely plagues businesses and this can happen at all levels. It most commonly happens when you’re scaling up in the couple hundred thousand a month range and really prevents scale and additional revenue.

Members of My Inner Circle are already scaling to $1M+ and beyond. This isn’t for beginners. It’s only for operators already at $100k+ per month who want proven strategies, speed, and focus. If that’s you, apply here.

Why Extreme Ownership Mentality Stops Blame Game and Forces Both Teams to Find Solutions

Here’s the first thing that’s very important to understand. I was blessed with the opportunity to go behind stage and speak with one of my favorite book mentors that I look up to and almost to a degree kind of idolize. It’s an American hero, Jocko.

Jocko is a marine. He went out into the world and conquered it, took out all the bad guys and came back and applies some of the most crazy stories about war and death and team building into businesses.

And he wrote an incredible book called Extreme Ownership. And he also has another great book called Discipline Equals Freedom. And I believe he has one or two others that are also awesome.

But anyway, point I’m trying to make is this extreme ownership book is a foundational mentality to initially solving this problem of sales versus marketing.

And it’s really simple to understand. It essentially breaks down this concept that you have to have accountability in order to assume some kind of change that you otherwise might not be able to see if you don’t accept accountability over a specific situation or set of circumstances.

The brain just omits its ability to change things until we view ourselves as responsible for whatever it is that we are trying to point the finger of blame at. Research in organizational psychology demonstrates that teams with higher accountability levels show 25% better problem-solving performance and faster improvement cycles.

So instead of deflecting responsibility and accountability, what we do is we embrace it.

When I get a sales team that comes to me and gives me the super weak feedback of, hey, these leads aren’t that qualified. Here’s one of the first things that’s important to understand before we go through all the tactics, I want to first make sure that the sales team knows what truly helpful feedback is.

Build End of Day Questionnaire With Thirty Questions, Sales Team Answers Every Single Day

And truly helpful feedback is articulate feedback. It’s typically a lot more in-depth in comparison to just saying, “Hey, the leads aren’t good enough.”

We want a sales team that has a full questionnaire that they ideally answer at the end of the day, and they want to do this every day. That way that feedback gets relayed to me every day and I can actually do something with it.

This is essentially an end of day breakout. It’s anywhere from ten to upwards of thirty questions give or take the specific sales management and clients that we work with.

All the teams at scale do this. There’s not a single team that’s doing million dollar months that doesn’t have this specific end of day questionnaire.

And a lot of it is just okay how are the calls today? And it asks essentially the same exact question from multiple perspectives.

Like okay so for the people who did show up, who were they? Give us a bunch of data on them. Tell us how those conversations went.

On a scale of one to five, how qualified would you deem them? In terms of one to five, how serious would you rate their buying intent?

Did you close anybody? Why did they close? Did anybody not close? Why did they choose not to close? Did anybody not show up? Did they articulate to you why they didn’t show up?

Just all kinds of questions like this. And I share the full list of literally all these types of questions with the literal example of what these end of day questionnaires look like inside of my inner circle program where we get twice a month one-on-one calls, weekly group calls, quarterly in-person masterminds, and of course our group chat full of wealthy people trying to get substantially wealthier.

But those are a few of the questions that we want to ask.

And when I get those questions at the end of every day, the first thing that I’m looking at is real-time feedback.

Instead of them just randomly coming out of the woodwork and saying, “Hey, man, the leads haven’t been that qualified these last few days.” Like what good is that?

How many were qualified? How many were unqualified? What does that mean? Were they financially unqualified? Were they serious people, but they appeared too early in the sales process?

I have to have feedback as a marketer that I can actually do stuff with.

So this is one of the most important things to start off with, which is feedback you can actually use. That’s what’s most important to understand, feedback that you can actually use.

So when you look at this, this is what then leads to action. This is what leads to initial improvement. That’s what’s important to understand about the feedback. This is what leads to initial improvement cycles.

This is where it all starts.

Why Sophisticated Buyers Ask Questions Your Closers Cannot Answer and What to Do About It

I got some feedback just recently on a newly launched account. They have a phenomenal sales team, great sales management, and this specific client, this person’s already done twenty million dollars a year with other offers that he has, and he wanted to launch a new offer, and he brought in the big dogs to do it.

Me and the sales team, we really agreed this deal has a lot of scale potential, so let’s get it cracking right away. I start doing my job immediately, really good, which I generally do.

I bring in a ton of really good, in this case almost overly qualified calls because here’s the feedback that I get from the sales team within these first few daily reports.

And let me be articulate here so you can really understand the problem in its entirety that was presented to me.

So this offer was a seventy thousand dollar high ticket service. It’s kind of like a done with you service.

Now in this specific service there is really two types of in-market buyers that we would ideally want to go after. There’s people that are already in the game doing this that just want to do it to an even higher level and want help doing it too. We’d consider that a sophisticated buyer. In addition to that, because they’re already in the game.

In addition to that, we have the people who are new to the game. These are the people who are not doing this yet, who want to get into it, who want to start the process, and want the help, but again, they’re not in the game yet.

As you can understand, if you’re sitting here reading this as somebody who already has a business doing several hundred grand a month, maybe you’re even at the million dollars a month and you’re adding that next million a month.

You can understand a bunch of terms that somebody who’s not in the game at all would never understand.

Sometimes I can just use little three-letter acronyms, like all the little CPL stuff and CPR and AOV. And I try my best when I say these random terms throughout my content in a serious way, not in an example way.

I’ll say AOV, average order value. That way I’m talking to the people already in the game and the people who might want to start the game or just not be as into the game yet.

Typically, the words that we use, they signal to one demographic over the other just as simple as a difference in a term being used, a word that somebody would know versus a word somebody wouldn’t know.

Again, that signals to who you’re technically talking to.

So I did an incredible job, technically almost too good of a job at getting so many people that were already in the game. And in this specific sense, that caused problems because the closers weren’t people that were in the game.

So they get people that show up that are super sophisticated buyer leads. These people are showing up with questions that the closers have no clue how to answer.

And due to the fact that the closers don’t know how to answer them, they make them look bad and they make it harder to close a deal as a result of this. And so that becomes a problem.

I notice that problem almost immediately because I’m getting that daily feedback that’s actually articulate.

The closers are straight up writing out in detail, “Okay, I had all these people show up and these were the specific things that held back the person moving forward and these were the specific things that I had no idea about.”

Put Breakout Videos on Confirmation Page to Answer Hard Questions Before Prospect Gets on Call

So what did we choose to do? Well just recently I unveiled this entire confirmation page best practices SOP. I rolled it out specifically to my inner circle members first, which is typically what I do.

I make sure obviously my clients too to be clear that we get a phenomenal result with it. I have more involvement with the inner circle people because I have one-on-one and group coaching with them.

So I roll it out to them first. I make sure that they do it well and then from there I roll it out to my broader student community of my master internet marketing members.

So anyway, moral of the story is that confirmation page best practices SOP. I’ve seen phenomenal results with it in my client accounts of improving show rate and making it so you can still sell to sophisticated buyer leads and make the closer jobs easier by having the business owner come in and answer a ton of those harder-hitting questions.

So what we had the closers do was obviously with these daily reports, they would list all the questions that they were failing to answer. And over the course of about two weeks of just consistently generating this type of lead, we accumulated a little more than twenty questions.

What we then did is we had the client turn around and answer these twenty very hard-hitting, closers would never answer them properly kind of questions.

We then put them on our confirmation page and we call these breakout videos.

And our breakout videos in this case, they made the closer job so much easier and they enabled us to start selling to that type of lead at a much higher rate.

These people started showing up essentially already satiated with the harder-hitting questions that they otherwise would have asked the closer and that the closer would have failed to answer.

And because we overcame that hump, the only real questions that a lot of these leads would show up with, assuming they’ve watched these videos, were just basic buying questions.

Nothing serious, nothing over the top, nothing about needing to understand how the game works and how this specific business can help them play the game more seriously. Just pretty basic stuff.

More questions about onboarding, questions about pricing and financing options. After all, this is a seventy thousand dollar offer. So there’s going to be some questions.

Anyway, moral of the story is we made the closer jobs a lot easier.

Split Ad Budget Fifty Fifty Between In the Game Messaging and New to Game Messaging

But at the same time, here’s what else I was able to do with that feedback. I was able to take that feedback and also go to the client and say, “Let’s make some new ads. Let’s change our verbiage from in-the-game messaging to new to the game messaging.”

New to the game messaging is also an incredible way to make the closer job easier.

So at this point when we’re launching a deal, we had about a thirty thousand dollar test budget for this call funnel. I had split the total budget from just all the sophisticated buyer in the game leads to about half and half.

Half new people, half in the game people.

And this led to also some incredible feedback right away. We saw a big lift in show rate improvement just from that new demographic being introduced.

We also saw right away, and this is also really important to understand, a lot more leads closing sooner.

The leads were coming in in addition to already watching all those videos. Very impressed with the business because keep in mind they’re new to the game.

This all of a sudden becomes a layup deal lead source where these closers are loving that type of lead.

So regardless of the fact that they were able to start closing the sophisticated lead, the closing statistics were just far better with the unsophisticated lead.

So right away we started shifting the budget from fifty fifty to while we’re scaling we’re spending a lot more money on the less sophisticated new to the game type of people.

Everything that I just articulated as simple improvements were literally all made due to the fact that I was getting this end of day actually articulate closer feedback coupled with the idea and the foundational mentality as a marketer of the Jocko extreme ownership.

I must at all times as the marketer maintain this idea. It’s the base mindset that you have to have. You can’t omit it. You must think this way.

This goes for the sales team too.

What can I do? If I assumed accountability over the fact that this was my fault. What could I do to improve this situation?

That’s where the ideas are. On the other side of that very thought, you have a lot of creative potential.

On the other side of that thought, as an example, that’s where plenty of my content advertising strategies originate from. My propaganda campaigns, my confirmation page best practices, my email marketing best practices, my advertising messaging changes that improve the circumstances and return on ad spend of every deal we’re a part of.

I mean, show rate improvement ideas, every single thing really all comes down to on the other side of that thought of if this was my fault, what could I do about it?

That’s where creativity lies.

Why Sales Blaming Marketing and Marketing Blaming Sales Creates Zero Improvement and Kills Revenue

That’s where a lot of marketers and salespeople fail, especially when they’re trying to scale up. Instead of that, they blame the counterparty and they just say, “Dude, this is your fault.”

You’re the one bringing us terrible leads. That’s why we’re not closing them. And the marketer is like, “Well, you guys aren’t closing them because you’re terrible salespeople.”

And you just get this circle of zero improvement happening. Meanwhile, the business owner, the bank, is just siphoning off cash to let these people argue.

The business owner, and this is the most important person that I talk to here, the person funding the whole operation that runs the deal, obviously wants to see improvement, and I assume you’re here reading this.

And if you are, pay attention to this.

This is why it’s so important for you to understand marketing too and for you to understand sales is because if you don’t, if you aren’t at the skill level mastery, if you aren’t highly experienced in both of these two exceptionally important things.

You might not even know the circle is happening.

If you’ve just been stalling out or even worse contracting in revenue, there’s a very high probability that this is happening right now in your business and your inability and your lack of awareness to address this whole thing is significantly holding back revenue for you.

As a culture, you hear about the word culture a lot. Culture is not some cheesy term that doesn’t mean anything.

Culture is essentially getting a collective amount of people to share a set of beliefs so they all think and act in alignment.

A great culture belief to inherit is this extreme accountability, this extreme ownership perspective.

It’s critical to having a business where people just aren’t pointing at each other and saying, “Hey, this is your fault.”

Instead, they point the finger at themselves and they say, “Okay, if this was my fault, what would I do about it? How would I improve this set of circumstances?”

So anyway, long story short, this has just as an idea, as something that you have to have within your organization a lot of potential.

How Hydra Strategy Uses Lead Forms With Conditional Logic to Load Setters With Qualified Prospects

I’m going to give you an example of the opposite now. A time where I did not inherit this set of beliefs. And I think it was very counterintuitive comparatively and I think it led to a lot of friction in the scaling of particular accounts.

Even if we got them to a million dollars a month, I feel like we could have got them there a lot faster.

So we have a strategy. It’s called the Hydra. And the Hydra is one of my favorite direct response strategies.

It leverages lead forms and it couples that with conditional logic and it essentially takes what would otherwise be an application funnel and it takes the application and puts it straight into a lead form within the ad channel of your choice.

And that ad channel typically give or take will allow you to leverage conditional logic to deny the wrong people from filling out the form and from only allowing the right people to fill out the form.

However, it generally leads after the lead form is filled to a call scheduling opportunity.

The downside is this is not optimized for scheduled calls. The scheduled calls are just kind of an upside. Although generally you get a very similar cost per scheduled call as what you would in a call funnel strategy.

The Hydra is not intended for that. Its intended use is as a direct response strategy to just load up the setters of the business with as many qualified people as they can get that they need to reach out to.

So if you have a really strong setting team, this becomes huge for what it enables you to do.

The downside of this strategy is it’s very sales dependent. It requires the salespeople to follow up potentially a dozen plus times in some instances both via phone and via text.

And it just requires this long-term commitment from them. And it compounds against them through time as well due to the fact that you have a daily lead flow that is pouring in while you’re also still following up with all the people who already poured in.

So that again it compounds against you mathematically. It becomes impossible over a set duration of time to follow up with everybody who already came in whether there’s potential for a deal there or not because you have to deal with all the new leads and the speed to lead is a prioritized very important variable in all this that dictates the connection rate being higher.

So the sales team, these setters, they know that they have to be able to reach out to people fast but they also have to juggle everybody that already came in.

So they’re constantly shifting between following up, calling new people, following up, calling new people.

Why I Blamed Setters for Low Connection Rate Instead of Building Assets to Help Them Connect

And when I first launched the Hydra, I coupled it with a few of our other best practices. I’d couple it with the hammer them strategy. And instead of having the hammer them strategy run for a seventy two hour window, I would look at the average connection rate time.

So if the lead came in and it took a day to get connected or if it took seven days with a highly sophisticated lead and a dozen attempts to get connected, I would run the hammer them for whatever that duration of time was to try to help aid the setters in getting a higher connection rate.

Well through time, again just by listening to the feedback of the setters, I saw a lot more opportunities.

But when I very first launched this strategy, almost egotistically to a degree, I would do the, “Well, I mean, you guys should be better at being able to connect with these people.”

You guys can send a selfie video on your phone and increase the connection rate tremendously. Oh, you guys can manually text out a lot of these sales assets and trust assets that are developed, and you should because that’s the highest possible place in terms of open rates where they have the ability to view it.

There’s a much lower view rate via content or emails. They’re going to listen to you. You’re texting them. Studies show that text messages have a 98% open rate compared to email’s 20% open rate, making SMS one of the most effective channels for immediate engagement.

And in reality, it’s like as soon, and thankfully, this didn’t go on too long. This might have lasted two weeks because I’m very self-aware.

And when I see myself doing something that’s just again counterintuitive, not beneficial, not revenue oriented, I cut that behavior immediately or as fast as I become aware of it and I try to change course.

So again, soon as I realize this, I just look at it and how it can be improved and I see so many opportunities.

Again, sales assets, trust assets, confirmation page best practices, super valued dense email sequences that ran over much longer durations of time.

And in addition to that, just augmenting the setter’s ability to dial more people with power dialers and condensing that mathematical window where it becomes impossible to follow up and extending it out instead of compressing it.

We get a lot more time now that a setter has the ability to follow up with people and we’re coupling that with all kinds of content marketing strategies.

And simply put, the strategy that was already so successful and so good that I was so enthusiastic about became just all the better as a result of those augmentations.

But again, those augmentations would not occur. That creativity would not exist. It just would not happen without me sitting there and thinking to myself, okay, this is my fault. What can I do to improve this right now?

Stop the sales versus marketing nonsense. There is no point in that argument existing. There’s no productivity in that. It’s a super low status thing to do. It just makes no sense. There is no revenue in it.

You have to overcome that hump as the business owner. You have to look for this constantly and you have to spike it into the ground if and when, god forbid, you ever see it creep into the mentality of one department over the other.

And some of these best practices I’ve talked about, and again, there’s many more and we cover them through our inner circle program that you can get access to if you’re making at least one hundred thousand a month already.

We had a person join in there just the other day. He’s already doing two point five million a month. He’s one of the people that’s ready to tack on that next million a month. That’s what he’s trying to do.

And to be clear, we don’t make any income claims. We don’t do any guarantees. By no means are we telling you, hey, you join into it and you’re going to hit a million a month or add the next million.

But hey, people who just like that person realize, okay, this person’s already been there and done that forty one different times. There’s clearly something to the game that this person’s doing that increases the odds a bit.

And if I can learn those things and apply them, maybe it increases my chances. That’s all we’re really doing. We’re just trying to increase your chance.

At the end of the day, again, we’re not making an income claim. We’re just trying to give you the resources and the lessons and seeing if it can make an impact on you too like it did for us.

So anyway, I cover a lot more of these types of lessons and a lot more depth inside of those resources that you can check out.

Marketer Must Read Daily Reports From Sales Team Not Just Check Box and Delete Email

Point being though, and this is very important you understand this. Something as simple and this is why I chose this out of all the other things that I could have talked to you about here today.

Just having daily end of day reports with great questions. The salespeople have a mandatory, it has to happen, disciplined, it’s a habit, they fill it out every day kind of practice.

And that goes to the marketer. The marketer actually takes the time to read that. Doesn’t just check all the boxes in the inbox and delete them out once they show up.

Genuinely looks at it and runs it through their brain. Tries to ask, “Is there anything here for me to do to improve this stuff?”

Put Sales Team in Marketing Meetings So They Contribute Ideas, Not Work in Separate Silos

I also want to close it out with this. A lot of the times on client deals, we’ll have calls where it’s just the marketing people in the call and maybe the business owner who’s there to listen in or somebody who’s responsible for at an executive level managing that department.

And we never have the sales people there. And separating your sales and marketing teams, that’s also a huge mistake.

These end of day reports are one thing, but when you actually have the sales and marketing team in tandem working together, there’s no reason that the sales team shouldn’t be aware of the improvements that marketing is making.

And there’s no reason that the sales team shouldn’t be there to help contribute ideas and lessons and feedback on what marketing is thinking of doing because that disconnected effort also becomes quite problematic.

That means that you have your departments siloed. When you choose to silo departments and you separate them out, there’s rarely crossover from one silo to the other.

And if there is, you obviously have to have a staffed middleman that goes between those two silos and relays data between one department and the other.

And again, how often does that actually occur?

Snowman Exercise Shows How Communication Through Multiple People Destroys the Original Message

At a mastermind that I had for my inner circle members, I did an exercise where I had six of them line up and I stood in the back and they all faced the back of the person in front of them and I had each one hold a piece of paper and a pen and they put it onto the back of the person in front of them.

Now I’m at the very tail end of this and I just said something. I didn’t show them. I said something to the person at the very back end of that thing and I said, “Okay, I want you to draw this.”

And as an example, I think I said something as simple as, I want you to draw a snowman.

So the first person hears that, puts the paper on the person’s back in front of them, and starts to draw a snowman. And that first person, as you can guess, they did pretty well on the snowman.

They drew a little top hat, the nose, the mouth, the carrots, the three little lumps of snow, the stick arms, like it looked relatively good.

Now as you can imagine, something being drawn on your back. You’re sitting there and you’re wondering, “What is this thing behind me here?” What’s being drawn? You’re obviously trying to visualize it in your head.

And then your job is to take what you think was written on your back and now do that to the person in front of you.

As you can imagine, the person who then had that drawn on their back that’s now drawing it on the person in front of them, it was nowhere close to a snowman. It looked terrible. It was just a bunch of random circles.

I think the second person interpreted it, if I remember correctly, as a car. He drew four wheels and a little square. It kind of looked like, if you’re familiar with this, the Kentucky Derby.

They give you a little piece of wood and they tell you carve whatever kind of car you want out of it and we’ll set it on this thing and have it roll down the hill to see who wins at the end. And it kind of looked like that.

So anyway, that person has what looks like a little Kentucky Derby car drawn on their back. They then try to draw what they think was drawn on their back to the person in front of them.

And it just got way worse. At the very end of the whole thing became just a random set of shapes in a palm tree. It was super random how it went from a snowman through this metamorphosis.

And that’s what happens when you add complexity to communication lines.

Every additional person that you add and you isolate all that information into one person who has to go over to another silo and relay it all accurately, every person interprets what they’re being told or what they’re being shown individually.

And when you collectively share information within one just coordinated meeting, that becomes the best possible way to get the information across so everybody has the highest chance of actually understanding that they’re being told to draw a snowman.

In comparison, it’s like you diffuse all that communication out and you add the layers to it. The message just gets diluted and misinterpreted and reinterpreted, however many communication lines there are in between the original source and where it was intended to end up.

That’s why I love these feedback calls and I love it when the salespeople are there. Even if it’s just a straight marketing meeting, give me a handful of the reps that are available at that time, and let’s see what their thoughts are, if any.

Maybe they’re great. Maybe they say, “Hey, this is exactly what we need to do. This is super smart what you guys are cooking up over here.”

Or maybe they say, “This makes no sense. Why are you guys trying to address that? This is what’s preventing people from buying on the calls. This kind of makes sense to talk about, not that.”

And again, you’re condensing the time that it takes to actually scale and achieve these bigger numbers.

So I hope you like this content. There’s many other pieces just like this, all centered around million dollar a month lessons that you can find right here.

Go check them out. You probably missed a few pieces or if you’re new, there’s a whole bunch there waiting for you. I’d encourage you to follow along if you’re not yet doing so.

And of course, if you want the additional help that my organization has to offer you, check out some of the information available. There’s something there for everybody.

Looking forward to the opportunity to help you get richer.

Summary: Extreme Ownership, Daily Reports, Sales, and Marketing in the Same Room, Not Silos

Your sales team can’t close because you don’t have extreme ownership. Both sides are blaming each other. Nobody’s improving anything.

Daily end-of-day reports with thirty questions. Every single day. No exceptions. Articulate feedback that you can actually use.

Sophisticated buyers need different handling. Breakout videos on confirmation pages. Answer the hard questions before the call.

New to the game messaging closes easier. Split your budget. Test both demographics. See which converts better.

Sales and marketing must collaborate. No silos. No middlemen playing telephone. Everyone in the same room.

The snowman exercise proves it. Every layer of communication destroys the message. Direct contact between teams wins.

If this was my fault, what would I do? That question unlocks creativity. That question drives improvement. That question makes you money.

Stop the blame game. Start taking ownership. Your revenue depends on it.

Most business owners waste years figuring out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering copywriting, funnels, ads, and more. If you’re ready to invest $5k and get serious about your skills, apply here.

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