Aligning Sales and Marketing with External Influencers to Win Over Internal Champions

Aligning Sales and Marketing with External Influencers to Win Over Internal Champions

Introduction

People often forget that the real key to influencing internal champions, building a brand, or driving marketing campaigns is attention. And not just any attention—attention that feels both interesting and important to the person on the receiving end.

Let’s face it: sales and marketing teams often operate in silos, and that’s a problem. If they don’t work together, they risk confusing the very decision-makers they’re trying to influence. Add an external influencer into the mix, and suddenly, the lack of alignment between these two departments becomes glaring.

Here’s the truth: to win over internal champions, you need marketing, sales, and external influencers all pulling in the same direction. Otherwise, you might as well be speaking different languages. Let’s dive into how you can break down these silos and create a unified approach that really resonates.

1. The Problem: Misalignment Between Sales and Marketing

You’ve seen it happen—marketing pushes to create awareness and attract leads, while sales swoops in at the end, focusing solely on closing deals. They both want to engage internal champions, but they’re working separately. The result? Disjointed messaging, missed opportunities, and campaigns that fall flat.

As Brent Adamson and his co-authors highlight in The Challenger Customer, the buying journey is more complex than ever. Internal champions don’t make decisions in isolation, and they’re definitely not swayed by mixed signals. If your sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned, you’re making it harder for them to move forward. And when you throw an external influencer into the mix, that misalignment becomes even more obvious.

Here’s the catch: Marketing and sales need to work together if you want to leverage external influencers to their full potential. Think of it like this: influencers bring the attention, but it’s the coordinated effort between marketing and sales that closes the deal. Without that, you risk losing your internal champion's trust—and the sale.

2. The Current Landscape: External Influencers Are Great, But Siloed Departments Are Not

Let’s paint a picture. You’ve got a brilliant external influencer with a strong following. They’re creating content that’s catching the attention of your target audience—your internal champions. Everything’s looking good on the surface, but there’s a problem: your sales and marketing teams are out of sync.

Marketing is driving external communication, trying to get internal champions interested, but sales isn’t aligned with that message. Sales is focused on closing deals and doesn’t have a clear view of what marketing is communicating through the influencer. What happens? The potential champion loses interest, or worse, gets confused about what your company actually offers.

According to The Challenger Customer, this kind of misalignment is common—and costly. If your teams aren’t working together, internal champions will struggle to see the value in your solution. And trust me, if they don’t see the value, they’ll stay stuck in indecision.

What to do instead: You need to bring sales and marketing together. Get them talking. Get them collaborating. Both teams should be fully aware of how external influencers are positioning your brand and shaping your message. This is the only way to ensure that when sales comes in, they’re reinforcing, not contradicting, what marketing has already communicated.

3. Perfect World Scenario: Everyone Is Aligned—Sales, Marketing, and Influencers

So, what does the perfect world look like? It’s pretty simple: sales, marketing, and external influencers are all on the same page, working together seamlessly to influence internal champions. The marketing team uses external influencers to build trust and create awareness. Once internal champions are engaged, sales steps in, with full knowledge of what’s been communicated. This coordinated approach ensures that the message is clear, consistent, and compelling.

External influencers are positioned as trusted advisors, bringing a level of credibility that sales and marketing alone can’t achieve. Meanwhile, your internal champions feel supported by both teams and are more likely to move towards making a decision.

How to get there: Regular meetings, shared goals, and constant communication between sales and marketing. Make sure both teams understand how influencers are being used and what role they play in the buying journey. The more aligned your efforts are, the more likely you are to convert internal champions into advocates.

4. Ignoring This Will Cost You

Here’s the reality: If you ignore the need for sales and marketing alignment, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Influencing internal champions is hard enough without throwing mixed signals into the mix.

Sales alone doesn’t have the reach or trust-building power of external influencers. Marketing alone can’t close deals like the sales team can. The two need to work together if you want to make a real impact.

If you keep letting these teams operate in isolation, you’ll miss out on key opportunities to influence internal champions when it matters most. And in today’s competitive landscape, you can’t afford that.

5. Breaking the Status Quo: A Singular Change for Big Results

If there’s one thing you need to change, it’s this: break down the silos between sales and marketing. Make them partners. Share KPIs, hold joint strategy sessions, and make sure both teams know exactly how external influencers are being utilised to reach internal champions.

This isn’t about completely overhauling your processes—it’s about making small but crucial adjustments to ensure that everyone’s working towards the same goal. The reward? A smoother, more effective path to winning over internal champions.

6. Actionable Steps to Align Sales, Marketing, and Influencers

Ready to take action? Here’s how you can start:

1. Hold Regular Cross-Department Meetings: Schedule consistent syncs between sales and marketing teams to align strategies around influencers.
2. Define Shared KPIs: Set up clear, shared performance metrics that both teams are accountable for, ensuring alignment from the start.
3. Co-Create Content: Get sales involved in the content creation process with external influencers to make sure the messaging resonates with the internal champions they’re trying to close.
4. Leverage Influencers for Both Awareness and Closing: Make sure influencers are not just generating awareness but also helping sales close the loop with tailored content that speaks to internal champions' specific pain points.

Conclusion: Align, Influence, Win

At the end of the day, it all comes down to alignment. Sales and marketing working together, with external influencers amplifying the message, is the winning formula. If you want to influence internal champions, it’s time to break down the barriers between your departments and create a unified strategy.

It’s not just about getting attention—it’s about holding it, building trust, and delivering a message that feels important. And that’s how you’ll turn internal champions into long-term advocates.

Now, over to you. Are your sales and marketing teams aligned? Are they leveraging influencers to their full potential? If not, it’s time to get everyone on the same page—and watch as your results soar.