Market View
What Sales REALLY needs from Marketing in 2025
Sponsored by:
Produced by:
James Skellington
Head of Strategic New Business at Force24
About James Skellington
James Skellington is the Head of Strategic New Business at Force24, a multi-channel marketing automation provider based in Leeds, England. With a focus on supporting brands in both B2B and B2C sectors, James helps organisations enhance their communications strategies, customer experiences, and internal processes through effective marketing automation. His expertise spans various industries, with particular emphasis on travel, slow-moving consumer goods, and home industries, where he helps brands nurture, engage, convert, and retain customers using Force24's innovative platform.
How has the increasing complexity of B2B buying groups affected the sales process, and what support is needed from marketing?
The purchasing cycle has become more scrutinised than ever, with multiple stakeholders involved in decision-making. We're regularly engaging with senior executives about commercial objectives, CFOs examining financial criteria, and procurement or IT teams verifying compliance standards. Each stakeholder, while working towards the same goal, requires a different approach.
The key is personalisation at scale. In marketing automation, we use dynamic content that adapts based on the recipient's role. Marketing needs to understand what content to produce and how to deliver it effectively, whether through targeted LinkedIn ads, PPC campaigns, or direct outreach. Beyond just sales and marketing alignment, it's about connecting the right people within organisations—whether that's MD to MD discussions or ensuring tech teams are aligned.
This complexity means we need to be incredibly agile in our approach. Marketing must support sales by creating diverse content that speaks to different stakeholders' concerns while maintaining a cohesive brand message. Success depends on combining multiple elements—from targeted LinkedIn communications to browser abandonment campaigns—all working together to create a comprehensive engagement strategy that resonates with each decision-maker in the buying group.
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The alignment between marketing and sales is where many brands miss the mark. These teams need to fuel and galvanise each other.
How can marketing and sales teams work together more effectively to drive revenue?
The alignment between marketing and sales is where many brands miss the mark. These teams need to fuel and galvanise each other. Marketing shouldn't create content without direction—it needs to be guided by sales conversations, market questions, and sector requirements. We need to consider how we can provide solutions that help brands navigate their challenges while developing thought leadership that adds value during the pre-purchase phase.
Unfortunately, I've seen many businesses where marketing operates in isolation, focused solely on lead generation targets. This can lead to a disconnect where sales either takes full credit for conversions and/or complains about lead quality. The solution lies in transparency and trust between teams. It's about understanding what each team is trying to achieve and how they can support each other's goals. Fundamentally, it’s all about conversion of clients that stay with you ; marketing are aiming deliver that as a primary, lead volume as a secondary priority. Often that can be a starting point ot identify the profile of who to target.
At Force24, we've implemented several practices to foster this collaboration. Our weekly sales meetings actively include the marketing team, giving them direct insight into deal positions and ongoing challenges. This transparency allows marketing to hear insights firsthand and create targeted content in response. We've also implemented practical tools like content hubs where marketing provides creative social media content that the sales team can easily access and customise for their specific conversations. The key is maintaining consistent communication channels while ensuring both teams understand their shared objectives.
What makes marketing qualified leads (MQLs) truly valuable to sales teams?
The effectiveness of MQLs fundamentally comes down to quality over quantity. In businesses where MQLs are consistently high-quality, marketing are worth their weight in gold. However, the reality is often different. Some organisations consider simple email opens as qualification, leading to higher volumes but lower quality leads, which quickly erodes sales team confidence in marketing.
At Force24, we take a more sophisticated approach, tracking behavioural activity, content downloads, and building a comprehensive single customer view over time. For high-volume situations, we've implemented triage processes, such as qualifying questionnaires about job titles and key objectives. This creates a natural prioritisation system—if you have a hundred MQLs and fifteen complete a follow-up form, you know exactly where to start. It's about working smarter, not harder to maximise efficiency while ensuring good opportunities aren't missed.
The key to successful MQL management lies in establishing clear definitions and processes that both sales and marketing teams agree upon. This includes setting specific criteria for what constitutes a qualified lead and implementing robust tracking systems to monitor engagement across all channels.
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In businesses where MQLs are consistently high-quality, marketing are worth their weight in gold to sales teams. However, the reality is often different.
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When you successfully align these teams, success follows. It's about maintaining open communication and understanding that while methodologies may vary, alignment is the key to achieving collective goals.
How can marketing support sales in understanding and engaging potential buyers?
The ideal scenario would be having complete visibility into who prospects are, their activities, requirements, timeframes, budget parameters, and commercial goals. While gathering such detailed information often requires direct interaction, we can implement effective strategies like lead scoring and gated content to gather insights during the interaction process.
Visibility is crucial—we need to know if potential customers are engaging with us through content downloads, event attendance, or webinar participation. This helps build a single customer view that assesses relevance based on various factors like industry, team size, and business objectives. For example, one customer might need to increase turnover by £2 million, which can be broken down into exact lead requirements based on AOV and current conversion rates, while others might have more ambiguous goals.
Data remains king in this process. The more we can measure—from web activity and email interactions to direct mail responses and event engagements—the better we can understand and scale our approach to potential clients. While some aspects are beyond marketing's control, it's about maximising what we can see and measure, whether that's focusing on lead quality through improved triaging or finding ways to increase volume and scale effectively. Success ultimately comes down to how well we can translate this data into actionable insights that drive meaningful conversations and relationships.
About Force24
Force24 is a leading provider of marketing automation technology based in Leeds, United Kingdom. The company's cutting-edge, enterprise-level platform streamlines and enhances marketing efforts across various sectors. With a focus on innovation and user-friendliness, Force24's platform enables comprehensive management of creative assets, campaign execution, and performance measurement. As a 100% GDPR compliant solution, Force24 ensures clients can navigate the evolving landscape of direct marketing with confidence.
About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.