Accelity spent thousands of dollars outsourcing lead generation without really knowing what worked. The engagement didn’t work for a number of reasons, but it raised an important question: how do you really call prospects effectively?
At the same time, there was a strong belief that cold calling was dead. As an inbound-focused team, calling felt like it contradicted the methodology behind the work.
After making hundreds of prospect calls, it became clear that both assumptions were wrong.
Calling isn’t dead. Fear is.
The resistance to calling rarely came from data or experience. It came from the stories people told themselves about what would happen on the other end of the line.
“It’s a waste of time.”
“No one wants to talk on the phone anymore.”
“I don’t want to bother people.”
In reality, those stories were never true. Fear was the real reason calling felt uncomfortable. As Daniel Pink says, today, everyone is in sales. Avoiding direct conversations doesn’t eliminate selling; it just delays learning.
What calling actually reveals
Calling is more personal. When you pick up the phone, prospects can hear your voice, your tone and get a sense of your personality. People buy from those they like and trust, and that relationship is easier to build when you talk directly.
It also gives you better information. Time and again, phone conversations revealed details that never surfaced over email. Silence didn’t mean disinterest. More often, it meant something simple:
“I remember our call last year and would love to work together in the future.”
“I took a full-time role and am not working in the business anymore.”
“We’re still thinking about it. Please follow up next month.”
Hearing that directly changes the entire conversation.
Every answer is a good answer
One of the most surprising parts of calling lost and cold opportunities was how often people responded positively. Many had intended to reply, lost track of emails or preferred talking on the phone altogether.
When working a pipeline, the goal isn’t just to sell. It’s to keep deals moving. Stalled opportunities clutter data and create false confidence. Getting an answer, yes or no, clears the path forward and makes the pipeline more accurate.
Even a no brings clarity and keeps momentum moving forward.
Helping instead of selling
The most effective calls weren’t transactional. The focus was on helping, not pitching. In consultative sales, showing up and immediately launching into a pitch rarely works. Listening does.
Offering help with nothing required in return builds trust before a prospect is ready to buy. That might mean reviewing a website, sharing a competitive insight or offering guidance that’s useful right now. This approach plants seeds long before there’s a budget or timeline in place.
It turns out this mirrors how strong relationships are built face-to-face. Calling simply extends that mindset.
Why leaders still need to sell
Calling isn’t just a sales activity. It’s a leadership one. Making a handful of calls each week is a manageable time commitment and provides insight that no report or dashboard can replace.
Leaders who sell understand the process deeply. That understanding shapes how they hire, train and support teams. Some lessons can only be learned by doing the work firsthand.
Calling isn’t as scary as it seems
Once the first call of the day is made, it gets easier. Planning calls ahead of time, setting aside focused time and simply starting removes most of the friction. People are far more receptive than expected.
Calling doesn’t have to feel outdated or aggressive. When approached as a way to learn, help and gain clarity, it remains one of the most effective ways to move work forward.
If you’re rethinking how marketing and sales work together, explore how Accelity helps teams build strategies rooted in clarity, momentum and real conversations.
A lot of people think sales sucks.
(I used to be one of them.)
When you think about sales, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
A pushy salesperson? A flood of LinkedIn DMs asking for “15 minutes of your time”? The classic stereotype of the used car salesman?
Sales has a stigma for a lot of us. But here’s the thing: sales isn’t just about closing deals or hitting quotas. It’s one of the most valuable skills you can build—in business and in life.
Why everyone should learn to sell
No matter what you do for work, you sell every single day.
You might not call it “sales,” but you’re constantly pitching ideas, influencing decisions, and getting buy-in.
- If you’re a creative, you’re selling your ideas to clients or your boss.
- If you’re a founder, you’re selling your vision to your team and investors.
- If you’re a teacher, you’re selling the value of learning to a room full of distracted students.
- If you’re an orthodontist, you’re selling your approach to nervous parents (trust me, I’ve been there).
And even outside of work, we sell. Convincing your friends to try your favorite brunch spot? Sales. Negotiating bedtime with your kids? Sales.
The truth is, selling is just communicating with confidence and empathy. The better you get at it, the more effective you become in almost everything else you do.
The fear that keeps people from selling
Learning to sell is really about getting over your own fears.
Fear of rejection. Fear of being pushy. Fear of hearing no.
According to psychology studies, rejection activates the same regions in the brain as physical pain—which explains why so many people avoid situations where they might hear “no.” But that avoidance can also limit your growth.
When I started Accelity, I relied on my instincts and referrals for years. Most of our new clients came through word of mouth. That worked fine… until I realized it would only take us so far.
If you have big goals—the kind that require scaling, expansion, or major career growth—you have to get comfortable selling. Sitting back and waiting for new business (or new opportunities) to appear isn’t a growth strategy.
How to start learning sales (without feeling slimy)
Here are a few easy ways to build your sales skills—no sleazy tactics required.
1. Take an online course.
Platforms like Coursera or HubSpot Academy offer free or affordable classes that teach modern, human-centered sales techniques.
2. Find an accountability partner.
Pair up with a friend or colleague who also wants to level up. Meet weekly, read books together, and practice role-playing scenarios.
3. Read To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink.
It’s a classic for a reason. Pink reframes sales as something we all do every day, and shows how persuasion and service go hand in hand.
4. Practice “selling” in low-stakes situations.
Pitch a new idea at work. Negotiate a deadline. Offer feedback with confidence. Small reps build the muscle for bigger conversations later.
5. Master inbound marketing to make selling easier.
The best salespeople know the job starts long before a conversation ever happens. When your brand is already attracting and nurturing the right audience, you’re not “convincing” people to buy—they’re coming to you ready to say yes. Inbound marketing funnels ready, qualified leads right to you.
Selling well means serving well
When done right, sales isn’t manipulation, it’s motivation. It’s about helping people make decisions that solve real problems.
If you can listen deeply, communicate clearly, and show genuine care for the outcome, you’re already better at sales than most people who do it professionally.
So whether you’re trying to close a client, inspire a team, or convince your family to watch something other than Paw Patrol tonight, remember: you’re selling every day.
And if you can learn to do it well, you can achieve almost anything.
P.S. I cover this topic in depth on my podcast, The Art of Entrepreneurship! Here are some of my favorite episodes to help you get started:
For CMOs driving growth in competitive markets, the real threat isn’t just a tight budget or a noisy market—it’s internal chaos. When brand, performance (demand) and sales operate in silos, it leads to duplicated work, wasted spend, fractured customer experiences and slower revenue growth.
Fact: Improving your marketing operations isn’t just about cleaner dashboards. It can unlock as much as 20% of your budget. Imagine what that reclaimed spend could do if it fueled growth instead of inefficiency.
Here’s what misalignment is really costing you, what the data shows and how to get your teams working together so results climb faster.
What “chaos” looks like (and why you should care)
Here are some of the most common failure points that quietly drain ROI—and the business symptoms that signal misalignment.
Conflicting messaging and brand friction
When brand and sales aren’t telling the same story, customers notice. A campaign might promise one thing, but the sales conversation heads in another direction, leaving prospects unsure about what your company actually delivers. When brand and performance teams work in isolation, both lose impact because audiences experience the full journey, not the departments behind it.
Attribution black holes
If your data lives across multiple platforms that don’t connect, you’re flying blind. Disconnected reporting and long buying cycles make it nearly impossible to see what’s really driving results. That uncertainty leads to wasted spend as teams over-invest in some areas and miss opportunities in others.
The leaky funnel between marketing and sales
This is one of the most common and costly issues. When “qualified lead” means something different to marketing than it does to sales, the handoff falls apart. Sales ends up chasing low-quality leads while marketing optimizes for metrics that don’t move revenue. Teams that align definitions and goals see faster follow-up, higher close rates and stronger morale.
Duplicated work and wasted spend
Without coordination, teams often target the same audiences or create similar content without realizing it. The result is duplicated costs and a fragmented customer experience. When planning happens together, budgets stretch further, messaging stays consistent and every touchpoint feels more intentional.
How Alignment Translates to Revenue
Companies that align sales and marketing are more than twice as likely to exceed their revenue goals. That’s not just about better teamwork: it’s a direct lift in performance that shows up on the balance sheet.
Stronger alignment and smarter measurement can also unlock 15–20% of existing marketing spend. For many mid-market and enterprise companies, that’s a six- or seven-figure opportunity—just by improving attribution and tightening cross-functional processes.
When brand and performance plans are built together, the return grows even faster. Research shows that balancing long-term brand investment with short-term performance activity delivers higher ROI than focusing on one side alone. Teams that treat them as partners, not rivals, see the compounding benefits.
It’s no wonder boards and CFOs are asking CMOs to connect marketing spend directly to business outcomes. The opportunity is too big to ignore.
Why alignment generates outsized ROI
Alignment drives results through three main levers:
- Efficiency of spend: When teams plan together, you avoid duplicate audience buys and fragmented campaigns. Instead of three separate media plans working at cross purposes, you get one coordinated strategy that stretches every marketing dollar further.
- Higher conversion quality: Creative that’s designed for both sales and performance and guided by data-driven optimization helps move leads through the funnel faster. Aligned teams consistently close more of the right deals and see stronger win rates.
- Better measurement and decision-making: Sharing data and agreed-upon measurement frameworks make budgeting and channel decisions much clearer. Using marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution helps teams act on evidence, not assumption, and keeps reporting accurate and consistent.
The CMO playbook for scalable alignment
Below are practical moves CMOs can deploy immediately—and over the next 90 to 180 days.
1. Executive alignment: set one north-star metric
Pick a single business-level north star that brand, performance and sales map to. Shared incentives and an executive sign-off make alignment real.
There many ways to measure marketing ROI; here are some examples:
- Revenue influenced: The total amount of revenue that marketing efforts help drive, whether directly or indirectly. It shows how marketing contributes to deals that close.
- Pipeline creation rate: The speed or volume at which marketing generates new opportunities or leads ready for the sales team to pursue.
- LTV:CAC (customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost): A ratio comparing how much value a customer brings over their lifetime to how much it costs to acquire them. Higher ratios mean more efficient marketing and sales efforts.
2. Define handoffs between teams
Document lead definitions, content handoff processes and acceptable lead quality. Capture them in a one-page go-to-market playbook and review monthly. This eliminates the “he said/she said” handoff problem fast.
3. Create a single source of truth for data
Bring all your data together—CRM, ad platforms, analytics and CDP outputs—into a unified source of truth (our agency uses Databox for this). Make sure everyone agrees on campaign naming and experiment labels so reporting stays consistent.
When everyone looks at the same numbers, budget and strategy discussions stop being political. Experts recommend using centralized modeling, like marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution, to make smarter, evidence-based investment decisions.
4. Establish a joint planning cadence and shared creative briefs
Hold quarterly GTM planning where brand narratives, performance audiences and sales plays are planned together. Use a single creative brief with clear outcomes and measurement tags so every asset supports both demand and sales channels.
5. Treat sales enablement as a core responsibility of marketing
Marketing owns the content and signals that make sales faster. Make enablement part of marketing’s KPIs—such as enablement score, content usage rate and pipeline influenced. This kind of coordination consistently links to stronger sales performance.
6. Keep alignment simple
Designate a lean team to manage the processes that keep everyone on the same page. They ensure data hygiene, consistent metrics and alignment meetings that move work forward instead of eating up time.
From alignment to advantage
Boards and CEOs expect marketing to prove impact. The fastest path to predictable marketing ROI isn’t adding another tool or hiring another agency—it’s building operational alignment. Shared goals, clean data and a culture that treats brand, performance and sales are all parts of the same story. When you fix the operating model, your spend works smarter, not harder.
Keep the momentum going—explore how small marketing shifts lead to big inbound wins in From Mistakes to Mastery: Your Blueprint for Inbound Marketing Success.