How to Gear Teams Up for Phenomenal Business Success

How to Gear Teams Up for Phenomenal Business Success In this competitive and fast-paced B2B landscape, having organizational alignment is imperative for improved sales performance, driving revenue growth, and scaling effectively. A misalignment between marketing and sales teams could result in inefficiencies, poor lead quality, and missed opportunities. How can these two functions achieve alignment and drive growth? That’s why we’re talking to Jeff Hoffman (Founder & Chief Revenue Officer, Jeff Hoffman, CRO), who shared best practices and strategies on how to gear teams up for phenomenal business success. During our conversation, Jeff highlighted the disconnect that arises when marketing teams hand off unqualified leads to sales. He also emphasized the need for creating a collaborative sales and marketing framework, including sales involvement in lead generation and developing marketing strategies. Jeff also introduced his Hoffscale method, a performance-driven approach that assesses, addresses, and scales business performance through focusing on product-market fit, go-to-market alignment, and situational deal management. https://youtu.be/qMPnpdxzyJg Topics discussed in episode: [2:30] Identifying the disconnect between B2B sales and marketing [7:54] The importance of defining your market scope and understanding your ICP [10:28] Key pitfalls B2B marketers should avoid: Not attending customer-facing meetings Not building a marketing proposition together with sales [14:18] Practical steps to improve the collaboration between sales and marketing Align on the market scope with the CEO & CRO Create a clear joint sales-marketing plan Define specific tasks and responsibilities for each team member [15:57] How to apply the Hoff Scale method to scale business performance [22:18] The challenges in traditional business development approaches [23:51] Some actionable tips for marketers to support sales teams effectively [26:16] Key metrics to measure sales and marketing collaboration success Companies and links mentioned: Jeff Hoffman on LinkedIn Jeff Hoffman CRO Glengarry Glen Ross Transcript Christian Klepp 00:00 In this competitive B2B landscape, it’s imperative that all functions within an organization work together to generate revenue and grow the business. If the marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned, that’s the perfect recipe for disaster. So how can you bring these two functions together, get them aligned, and gear them up for success? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. And I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Jeff Hoffman, who will be answering this question. Jeff is a fractional and interim Chief Revenue Officer working with small to mid sized enterprise software and SaaS tech companies worldwide. His expertise includes close to 30 years in the enterprise software and SaaS tech industry. Find out more about what his mission is. Christian Klepp 00:47 All right, I’m going to say Mr. Jeff Hoffman, welcome to the show, Sir. Jeff Hoffman 00:51 Thank you very much, Christian. Pleasure to be with you. Christian Klepp 00:55 Great to have you on the show, Jeff. And before we dive in, if you’ll permit me, let me just set this up for the audience a little bit, right? Because this is a podcast specifically targeting B2B marketers. So for the audience out there, you might be wondering, well, if that’s the case, then how come you’ve got the CRO on the show? And I’ll tell you why. I personally did not start out in marketing. I started out as a sales guy, right? I went out into the field. I was in the trenches, and I think every responsible B2B marketer should understand what it’s like out in the field. They should understand what sales go through. They should understand the challenges and objections they face. They also should understand how the company generates revenue, right? Christian Klepp 01:39 And for that reason, it’s in the interest of marketers to collaborate with sales as best as they can. So now that I’ve said that, that’s the reason why I’ve got somebody like Mr. Jeff Hoffman on the show, right? So let’s dive right in. Okay, so Jeff, you are on a mission to help companies increase revenue performance and decrease time with the wrong prospects. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, how to get alignment between B2B, marketing and sales and gear them up for success. So I’d like to kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. First question is, where do you see the big disconnect between marketing and sales and number two, where do you see most teams struggle? Jeff Hoffman 02:30 Well, the big disconnect is a lot of marketing people, and this is not a knock on marketing, per se, but where the disconnect often comes from is marketing and sales should be a team sport. Number one, it’s not two individuals supporting, you know, the top line of a company, it’s, Hey, we’re collaborating, but when you don’t see the collaboration done correctly, you see marketing people believing, in today’s day and age that once they put a bucket of leads into a coffer, they just run around and say, You know, it’s easy for them to say, well, here are the leads. These are the MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead), we’ve qualified the leads like the old Glengarry Glen Ross show, where, you know the movie. Here are the good leads. Well, not so fast. Are they really qualified leads before you’re handing them off to sales. And I think this is an inherent problem if you have marketing people who’ve never been in the field, and they’re handing off what they deem to believe are a book of real opportunities, because they got them either through, you know, inbound lead sourcing through the website, or a set of SDRs (Sales Development Representative) running around in another country, you know, handing off a whole bunch of leads and saying, Here you go. These are the MQLs now hand them to your sales people, and if they can’t do anything with them, they must be bad salespeople. So there is the initial disconnect. Jeff Hoffman 04:32 To the second part of your question. If you have real qualified leads to hand to the seller, I think where the teams struggle collectively, marketing teams with the sales team are in general, lead generation and then taking real leads and further qualifying them as the set. So the lead gen is an issue for marketing today, because you cannot do what was done more effectively, up to like the year 2015 you cannot easily, if you’re unless you are a branded company in the marketplace, it’s very hard to be a no name company and expect people to talk to the stranger, so you have to come up with some very creative lead generation marketing strategies to create real, qualified leads. That’s an inherent issue. But then you also then need a framework to be able to manage the sellers effectively, so that they are taking a lead that is hopefully real, and further qualifying it to determine whether it should even be in the CRM system, and how do you further qualify that lead, and then, you know, determine that it’s real, and assuming that it is, how do you then cultivate the opportunity over a period of time and forecast It accurately so that you avoid deals you know, slipping from quarter to quarter and or never closing at all. And that requires what I refer to as situational deal management, where you’re using, uh, a framework that I’ve built out over the years through my Hoff Scale Method that I’ve developed, um which is used to eradicate, you know, under performance at these companies. And the framework toggles a forecasting model with staged events, six staged events using a working close plan. And when you toggle those three things together, those three elements using the right coaching per deal, which means you got to have a really good sales manager, you will mitigate risk, which is critical. You want to mitigate risk, because you want to be able to say, Hey, we got a real deal, and we’re going to move that real deal through the pipeline, we’re going to forecast it accurately, and then we’re going to close it. So this is, this is the thing. Christian Klepp 07:35 Yeah, some really great points you brought up there, Jeff. And thanks so much for that. I had a follow up question for you, just based on the disconnect between the teams, how much of that would you say is perhaps maybe for marketing, for lack of understanding of who the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is? Jeff Hoffman 07:54 That’s a very good question, and that gets back to one of the things I do with my Hoff Scale Method. I want to make sure that there’s alignment with selling, marketing and product development at the very beginning, to quantify the market potential for that ideal customer profile, and oftentimes that original, what I call market scope, is not done effectively. It’s not done so you’re guessing. You’re thinking, this is our ICP because but in reality, you don’t really know that that is your perfect ICP. You haven’t quantified your market potential to determine your margin, where your margin should be in order for you to be profitable, if you’re guessing in the beginning, and then you don’t find enough of the right opportunities through your ICP, what do you do next? Well with the Hoff Scale Method, my system of building a revenue management model that operates like a conveyor belt with consistent sustainability and scalability, you are constantly reevaluating and reassessing your market potential, and who determines the ICP within the market that you’re going after? Because competitors, the competitors in your market, there’s always new ones, and you might find you’re not getting, you’re not reaching enough real opportunities in what you believe is your ICP, so you have to always be thinking about new revenue streams. And I would argue to answer your question directly, that marketing people are a byproduct. They haven’t, you know, directly done them the market scope and. They’re just relying on a CEO to tell them, hey, this is our market. And a lot of times that’s not done as effectively as I’m suggesting it needs to be. Christian Klepp 10:10 Absolutely, absolutely and I love that you brought up the Hoff Scale Method, because we’re going to get into that in a bit. Moving on to the next question again, in terms of, like getting both sides to collaborate with each other. What are some of the key pitfalls that they should avoid, and what should they be doing instead? Jeff Hoffman 10:28 They should avoid relying on the seller to handle the selling, and they should collaborate on what the value proposition is based on what sales people need to be able to say, in terms of statements that sellers need to make to the potential buyers, and questions that should be asked when they’re in the meetings, because that’s the trenches. When you’re in the trenches is where the value proposition really shines or doesn’t shine. I think one of the pitfalls is that marketing who’s not going to the meetings. The marketing people typically don’t go to the customer facing meetings, although they should, because I would always want to include marketing people in meetings, but if they’re building out the value proposition without getting a collaboration from sales, it’s a pitfall. You want the collaboration from sales, because they’re the ones in the trenches living what it feels like to be in front of people who give you the objections. So build that value proposition together. Don’t just tell marketing, go build, build the value prop, and then tell it to sales and say, Here’s your value proposition. Now, go use it. Build it together. Christian Klepp 11:52 Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I can attest to that, because I used to go out into the field with the sales, right, and I would listen to the way that they would handle the objections and questions. And back then, when I was starting out, they used to call it barriers to entry and the argumentations to counter the barriers. But that sounds a bit confrontational, right? These days, I think it sounds like more like objections, and then the talking points to handle the objections, right? Yeah, something of that effect. Jeff Hoffman 12:22 Correct. Yeah, yeah. You gotta, you know, sometimes, whether you call it a barrier to entry or an objection, I mean, it’s all the same. Christian Klepp 12:34 Right. Jeff Hoffman 12:35 You have to be able to make sure that everybody’s on the same page. You know, the buyers, the people that are going to pay you the money, and the people that are asking for the money, they have to be on the same page. And oftentimes it’s just not the case. You know, I don’t care what the scenario is, it’s just typically not the case. People have to listen, you know? I mean, if someone’s somewhat interested, that’s why they’re taking the meeting with if the buyer at a company, or buyers at a company take a meeting with sales people, is because they’re curious. At the very least, and at the very best, they have a pain point that they think that sales group can solve for them with a product or a service offering that they believe they might want. But you have to go through and dance, and that dance includes being able to go through objections. And you know, if you if the sales people don’t handle the objections properly, because we’re all human beings. So you know, humans react to comfort level at the end of the day, you know? So if there’s an objection, the sales people need to be cognizant of the fact that they’re talking to another human. And there’s got to always be a sense of, I want the people that we want that we’re we believe we can help. We want those people that we believe we can help to feel comfortable. Christian Klepp 14:01 Absolutely, absolutely. So I know you’ve talked about this a little bit already, but like, based on your experience, what are some steps that marketers can take to improve that collaboration with sales, like, what does that look like? Jeff Hoffman 14:18 Well, I think initial steps are, do a market scope with a CEO, a Product Development Lead your Chief Revenue Officer, do a market scope together, and then build a copious and compelling, quantifiable sales and marketing plan that actually shows specific tasks that people need to do, both for marketing and from sales, and when those tasks will take place, and what categories they’re part of, so that it’s you have a game plan that everyone is singing from the same music sheet, and people can visually. It, and they can see it, and they know what their responsibilities are like in a military environment, you know you can’t go into war and go out there without a game plan. You’re going to be dead in a heartbeat. So build a sales and marketing plan, collectively, once you’ve quantified the market potential, you know where your margins need to be, build that go to market game plan and collaborate on who does what, from the sales side, from the marketing side. Christian Klepp 15:35 Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Those are some really great points. You talked about it already, but like, the Hoff Scale Method, right? So I would say, like, like, unpack this. This is, you know, kind of, like something that’s, that’s, that’s in a box, and we’re opening it up now, right? So explain this approach to us and how this approach can benefit both the marketing and sales teams. Jeff Hoffman 15:57 Right, so in my 35 years of being in sales, sales management, C-level positions at B2B software companies. The one thing that I’ve seen forever is two problems. The problems are not enough real opportunities in a pipeline, and you can’t and you don’t have deal certainty, so you need to fix those two issues right? You need to create an approach that builds a healthy pipeline of real opportunities, and you know that the deals that get forecasted are closing in the timelines that they are supposed to close. So I developed the Hoff Scale Method to essentially eradicate under performance by fixing those two problems, and I do it through a mantra that enables me to assess the problem or problems by looking at product market fit. Is it quantifiable or not? Does the go to market align to it? And then, is there a framework in place to ensure that the sales teams and the support staff responsible for bringing in the money are actually finding, cultivating and winning business and forecasted timelines, and that is more sales management related. So I’m assessing and aligning with the Hoff Scale Method, the product market fit to the go to market plan to executing deals in forecasted timelines using various processes and situational techniques. Jeff Hoffman 17:52 And once I assess, I fix the problems with retooled sales and marketing plans that are quantifiable, and then I scale the business using an approach that you know is a growth strategy, approach to triple revenue and increase valuations, because most of the companies in B2B enterprise software are invested companies through either venture capital money or private equity money. So they want to see their returns paying off. They want to see returns on their investments. So you want to be able to scale their businesses. So Hoff scale method is assessing fixing and scaling. And I would, I would add that it’s not just assessing and fixing, it’s assessing and building. Oftentimes, it’s about simply adding new revenue streams to what it already exists. So you’re not just fixing a problem, you’re creating new solutions, new ideas, new creative ways to make more money. And that is the pro, that is the whole model. With the Hoff scale method, it’s a method. It’s an approach that enables you to be sustainable and scalable like a conveyor belt, forever. Christian Klepp 19:23 Sounds like a pretty solid approach. And if I heard you correctly, this is based on, like, your years of experience out in the field. Correct? Jeff Hoffman 19:30 Yes, it’s based on 35 plus years of living it in the trenches, having worked for companies, you know, some were brand companies, some were innocuous companies, and no one’s ever heard of, but working at all these different companies where inevitably, there was a lot of failure because they did not codify or an approach that would enable success on a consistent basis, it was more reactive. And I see, I see this a lot. It’s oftentimes very reactive, because it starts, I mean, I, you know, I don’t mean to sound cynical, but a lot of CEOs of these companies do not come from business acumen in backgrounds. They come from Product Development backgrounds. They come from engineering backgrounds. They do not come from living it. And at the end of the day, all of these companies, at the end of the day, what do they have to do? They have to go out and make money. They have to go out and, you know, bring in top line, and they have to ensure that the bottom line is good, so that the cost is not greater than the money they’re bringing in. And you better know how to go out and get the money consistently. You can’t be reactive. You can’t imagine it. Occasionally, have a home run, and occasionally you strike out, or you strike out too many times, and then you have a bad year, and then you’re just making changes all the time. So I just saw too many bad stuff, too much bad stuff happening all over the place. And I, as my brain continued to grow and evolve, I said to myself, How can I fix this. How can I make it better, so that sales people and sales management teams and CEOs of companies and all the people that are responsible for success are having a happier and a healthier go at doing what they need to be doing. Christian Klepp 21:39 Absolutely, I mean, the assessing, fixing, building and scaling that totally makes sense. I’m gonna play a little bit of the devil’s advocate here, if you’ll permit me the bit about creating new revenue streams. I mean, in theory, that sounds like a great idea, but, you know, we’ve all seen how sometimes that can go all right, how do you, how do you get internal buy in for that? Because, as you said before, right? Like we are creatures of comfort, but creating new revenue streams sounds like something that will make people within the organization uncomfortable. So what’s your approach there? Jeff Hoffman 22:18 My approach is just talking the truth. And maybe if a company is seeing their margins declining year over year for more than two years, if a CEO of a B2B software company, or really any company, is seeing their margins decline for two plus years, and the the founder of the the lead investor firm that has put money into the company and is expecting their bets to pay off, and they’ve lost all this money, I think it’s like, Hey, I mean, what’s the what is the definition of of insanity? To me, the definition of insanity is to can you continue to do something and hit your head against the wall when it’s not working? You don’t continue to still go after a revenue stream if you’re if you’re not making enough money, I mean, how much can you take? You have to sometimes take a chance to do something different to get to a better result. Christian Klepp 23:22 Ain’t that the truth? Absolutely. Okay, Sir. So we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and Jeff, you’ve given us plenty already, right? But just imagine that there’s a B2B marketer out there that’s listening to this episode, and you want them to take action on what you’ve been saying right away, like not in six months, not in 12 months, like right after they listen to this interview, what are like three to five things that they can do right now to improve their collaboration with sales. Jeff Hoffman 23:52 They can curate a list of accounts to target. They can work with sales on coming up with collaborating on creative new strategies to bring business into the company that is fresh and unique. I don’t have the answers to that, but there needs to be a creative flow of, how can we find new ways to bring in leads other than what we’re currently doing, and that should be an ongoing conversation, but you definitely want to work with sales to curate a list of companies that you know you can go after and target you want to sell as a team. So, as we talked about earlier, and you alluded to it, get marketing in front of the customers too. You know, get the marketer in front of the customer so that they’re seeing what’s actually going on firsthand in. Make them smarter. It’ll give them better ideas on how to build a marketing approach to support the sales efforts by being out there in front of the customers. Christian Klepp 25:12 One of the things that I definitely took away from all these field visits is the way the customer speaks the words they use, even in the objections, like thinking about how they say it, right and that, and then reflecting that in, like, copy on the website, or copy in in sales materials, right? So that when the customer does look at that stuff, they’re like, Hey, this is me, right? Versus like, Who’s this? Who’s this written for which is a situation that a marketer never wants to be in. The next question is a love it or hate it question, and let’s just look at it from a top level in terms of metrics. Because, you know, at some point when you’re having a meeting with the board or with the CEO, marketers have to show like, look, this is the result of our collaboration with sales, and we are making progress. So I’m not talking about MQLs, obviously, or impressions on a website. What metrics do you think marketers need to be paying attention to to show that their collaboration is working? Jeff Hoffman 26:16 I think marketers need to pay attention to, uh, how many deals are slipping from quarter to quarter? That would be a metric that would help me define whether or not they’re handing off real opportunities or handing off garbage and expecting sales people to do hat tricks. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of sales people who do not know how to qualify opportunities, and there’s a lot of bad sales managers out there that do not at every level, whether they’re a director, a VP, a CRO, there are a lot of managers, including CEOs, that have no clue how to actually help and coach and teach in a very leadership oriented way the sales team so that they are continuing to qualify the opportunities correctly. So it doesn’t all fall on marketing, but you want to make sure you’re handing off real opportunities so that the sales people are not wasting their time going through and trying to make hay out of something that’s not real. So a metric of deals that are slipping quarter to quarter or put into the forecast and never closing would be an indicator or a metric if something’s not quite right, and it should be an alarm bell going off to marketing to say, Hey, you got to fix this. Christian Klepp 27:45 Yeah, well, that’s a really good one. That’s a really good one. Okay, here comes the soapbox question, what is the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why? Jeff Hoffman 28:01 You know, I tend to disagree that traditional business development is working. I mean, the status quo in general. I don’t care what you sell, whether it’s a B2B Company or some other sort of company, there tends to be the status quo that if you’re a salesperson, you should be able to go out there in the world, in the wacky, crazy world that we’re living in, in 2025 and go find a real opportunity and make it happen out of the blue, and we are living in 2025 in a crazy world where there are so many charlatans that come at you, you know, from left field, all day long on LinkedIn, on your spam phone, phone calls coming through spam, text messaging, spam emails that come in every day, and now they’re all hitting your inbox. They’re all getting to you, and it’s all crap. And so I think I strongly disagree that you can use traditional business development to go out and find deals, if you’re in sales, you cannot, you cannot use traditional business development. You should still do it and try. But the percent of traditional business development of outreach is not going to work as well, because the charlatans have made it harder for the real, traditional business developer to make their case. No one’s going to want to listen to them. It’s hard. Nobody wants to talk to the stranger. Jeff Hoffman 29:56 So how do you get around that? You have to create as I’ve been a. Alluding to in this whole discussion, creative to the bit, you have to create new styles, new ways, new styles of doing business development that is not the old school, traditional status quo. I’m gonna make 20 cold calls. I’m going to send out 1000 cold messages on LinkedIn to people that don’t know me. And expect that I’m going to get a 10% hit. You’re lucky if you get just over 0% now, you will get over 0% but it’ll be less than one. So you need to insert the new styles. And again, that’s a marketing lead generation program that. And again, it’s not easy in 2025 it ain’t easy. But if you’re thinking about it and talking about it regularly, between a CR a Chief Revenue Officer talking to a Chief Marketing Officer and a CEO, and they’re all talking about this topic. What can we do? Let’s think. Let’s wake up. Let’s think and talk again. Let’s talk and let’s keep talking. You will get there. That’s all I can say, is you will come up with better answers, because you’re going to know your market. You’re going to see what’s been working, and you the light bulbs will eventually come on, but you have to be, that’s got to be. How do we do this differently? Because the status quo, it ain’t working. Christian Klepp 31:32 Absolutely, absolutely. It’s like those people like, you know, after after the pandemic and after COVID, and suddenly the door to door salesman came back, right? Or people were using the same sales tactics at trade shows. All right, let’s just hand out all this swag and ask for people’s phone numbers, because that’s exactly what they want, right? They want you to call them right after the show, right? Jeff Hoffman 31:56 Yeah. I mean, we’re in a different world. You know, people in general, have never really wanted to be sold to, but we lived in a different time in in society where, I think the world globally, the world globally in 2025. I think just as a nuanced innate observation, I think most individuals are just trying to survive. They’re just trying to get through their day, hopefully earning a living so that they can pay their bills and get to the next day. There were times in our society, in our global society, where things were better and people had extra time to kill, and so if the stranger, salesperson did some outreach many years ago, you know, back in the 20th century, or up to maybe 2010 or 15 in America or other countries, um, society at large. You know, there was a point where someone would take a call or an outreach, cold message of some sort, and they, they look at you and say, I like this. This person is coming at me. They’ve got some ambition, they’ve got some chutzpah. They want to do something. They want to make it happen. I admire that. Now you’re a terrorist before anything else you first are. Oh, my God, who’s the charlatan coming at me? The world’s changed. So it’s sad. Christian Klepp 33:44 Absolutely, absolutely. It’s challenging, no doubt. But let’s, let’s wrap this up on a positive note, shall we? So here comes, here comes the bonus question. So I haven’t got authority that authority that you’re also a lecturer at the NYU School of Professional Studies. So let’s just say, after this interview, somebody gives you a call and says, Hey, Jeff, I’ve heard the interview. I love the Hoff Scale Method. I want you to come to I want you to come and teach at our institution of higher learning. If you were to pick anywhere in the world to go and teach, where would that be and why? Jeff Hoffman 34:20 That’s an interesting question. Well, I mean, you know, where would I want to go teach and why? I mean, there’s a part of me that would want to teach at, and I don’t know the name of the school or, you know, I mean, on some level, you could say, I could say I’d like to teach at an MBA school, because the people in those programs are all trying to, on some level, build businesses and create success for those businesses, and so it wouldn’t really matter what the name of the school was, but any school with people that are trying to build businesses and need guidance and insight and appreciate a perspective from someone who’s actually been there and done it, been out there in the field and done it, is where I want to be. You know, I don’t necessarily need to teach at a school where they want to hire people who’ve had such coveted titles and they want to rest on their own laurels. I want to go to an environment where the people that I’m teaching appreciate a perspective from someone who’s been there and done it and can really help them get out there in the world and figure out how to make things happen and provide some insight that will get them on their way. Christian Klepp 36:02 Fantastic, fantastic. Jeff, this has been such a great conversation. So thanks again for coming on the show and for sharing your experience with the audience. Quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you, and where can they read about the Hoff Scale Method. Jeff Hoffman 36:17 Well, I appreciate that. So the Hoff Scale Method will be a releasable document, soon to be released on LinkedIn and other forums, but they can get it directly from me by just reaching out to me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffalanhoffman/) and or on my email (jeff@jeffhoffmancro.com). I don’t know if you put my details into this chat, but the email and LinkedIn would be the ideal ways for people to get to me. Christian Klepp 36:55 Okay, okay, we can definitely drop your LinkedIn handle in the show notes for this episode, right? Jeff Hoffman 37:00 Excellent. Christian Klepp 37:01 That’s fantastic. So once again, Jeff, thanks for coming on the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Jeff Hoffman 37:06 Thank you, Christian. I appreciate the time. Christian Klepp 37:08 All right. Bye for now.