Creating Sales & Marketing Alignment with Siro for In-Person Sales

Sales and marketing alignment at an in-person sales company means marketing knows why deals close or die, not just what the outcome of a deal was. Most blogs on the topic talk about having more meetings, creating shared dashboards, and having service-level agreements between departments.

But if you work at an in-person sales company, there’s one main touchpoint not mentioned: the most important conversation in your funnel happens in a living room, a showroom, or a leasing office.

I run demand generation at Siro, and I own the budget to source leads and book meetings for our sales team. For most of my career, everything I knew about what happened inside them came from someone else's retelling.

To clarify, today’s marketers do not lack data. We have a dashboard for everything. The outcome of every appointment is tracked in our CRM, but marketing sees a closed-won with no story behind it.

The sales and marketing alignment gap: marketing gets the outcome, sales holds the why

A marketing leader at a home improvement company described a gap they were facing, and I think about the quote a lot: “Before Siro, we had no visibility into what happens until 3 months after the appointment is run.”

For their marketing team, that’s an entire quarter’s worth of ad spend that kept flowing, often against assumptions the appointments may have already disproven, and the person who signed off on that spend finds out last.

I lived a smaller version of this before Siro. My last company was a heavily inbound go-to-market org (GTM), meaning marketing booked most of the new discovery calls. We ran a tight weekly feedback loop with sales, drilling into disqualification reasons to tune targeting and messaging. But the loop had one flaw: the CRM’s DQ-reason field. Our sales team kept picking the first option on the list, “poor fit,” no matter what the actual reason was.

For a while I assumed the fix was discipline: get the sales team to fill out the field right. Watching it play out cured me of that. Sales people are paid to sell, not to report, and no amount of field hygiene changes that. The only fix that worked was going back to the recordings and hearing what disqualified the deal in the customer's own words.

A Siro customer's marketing team got to the same place faster than I did. Once they saw recorded field conversations, they stopped thinking of Siro as a sales tool at all. Instead, it became "a data center on every conversation we have to date. How can we let that information inform our marketing plan?”

In home improvement, the lead-quality argument ends when both sides can hear the appointment

Every home-improvement marketer knows the standing argument. Sales says the leads are not qualified. Marketing says the appointments are not being run well. Both sides argue from the same CRM field, and the field really can’t tell you who is right (in my opinion, it’s neither).

A home-improvement marketing leader shared, “we spend millions of dollars on marketing to generate inbound phone calls.” The feedback on those millions arrives months later, often as nothing more than “price too high” in a dropdown.

A recording ends the argument, because now there is a specific appointment both sides can hear. If the homeowner was never a fit, the conversation shows it, and the lead source gets fixed. If the homeowner was ready and the discovery fell flat, it shows that too. Either way, the meeting moves from blame to a fix.

The marketing teams that are furthest along in solving this feedback loop are running it in the other direction too. A home-improvement marketing director described their nurture program: when a deal does not close, marketing follows up with messaging built from what the homeowner actually said in the appointment. “It's a higher conversion because it's referencing stuff they actually talked about.” The drip stops being generic because the source material is the customer's own words.

Another Siro customer’s marketing team wanted to know whether home shows, bus benches, or radio ads deserved the next dollar, so they funneled the “where-did-you-hear-about-us” answers they’d collected from recorded conversations straight into their CRM. So much additional value created, all coming from one source: sales conversation recordings.

In new-home sales, alignment is critical because marketing and sales share one buyer journey

Homebuilding is the vertical where marketing and sales teams can’t even pretend to work separately. The online sales counselor, who usually rolls up to marketing, warms the buyer and hands them over to the new home consultant at the community. More than 90% of community traffic arrives through that handoff.

For decades, marketing's only real feedback tool on that journey was the mystery shop, which often ends up feeling staged, and is infrequent and expensive. Recording the new-home tour does the same job as mystery shopping, but it’s done on every real buyer, every week. Which messaging lands, which amenities move decisions, and why a buyer chose the competitor's community down the road.

Leadership is already asking for exactly this cut of the data. A VP of sales at a production homebuilder wanted their tour conversations sliced like a research report: “Break this down into personas. Tell me about their concerns and their challenges and their objections by segment.” No CRM field can answer that, but an entire season of recorded tours can. One homebuilding team has gone a step further, lifting buyer phrasing from its tours into its search content so the words prospects type match the words buyers actually say — impressive.

For multifamily marketing teams, what residents say in tours becomes the clearest attribution model

Multifamily splits their marketing funnel cleanly in two. Marketing owns the ILS listings, the ads, and the traffic numbers. Leasing owns the tour. The attribution model sits between them, and it helps determine where marketing’s budget should go.

A multifamily marketing leader described to us what their model kept missing: “We were attributing marketing dollars to a Google Ad, but in reality customers were saying ‘I saw you via a commercial on TV, then Googled you.’ So let's flood the dollars into commercials instead.”

Personally, this is my favorite story. Attribution is the part of marketing that has been driving me up a wall for years. Last-click hands the credit to the final step of a journey it never saw, and the budget follows the credit. What this operator did is a fix I actually see holding up: ask the residents themselves. The tours are already happening, the question takes ten seconds, and the answers stack up into something you can plan spend against.

The same tours settle bigger arguments than media mix, they offer insights into capital planning too. LV Collective kept hearing prospects ask about wellness amenities while the dog run barely came up, so they built a wellness spa with a cold plunge instead. They saw that the amenity they focused on selling was one that no one asked for, and had the insights that told them to pivot to something better.

What sales and marketing alignment looks like with sales conversation recording data

Most sales and marketing alignment programs produce more meetings. Here is my recommendation, broken down by marketing’s job list, where each job lives today, and what data from sales conversation recording adds:

At Siro, our marketing team runs this loop ourselves, and I have a great example:

We were putting real budget into a space where we have never shown ads before. Instead of guessing at messaging, I had Siro analyze the data between our own sales team and prospects in that space: 255 recordings from the last 90 days, most of them with people at the exact accounts we are targeting. What came back was a working messaging guide. What this audience looks like, what they care about, direct quotes from specific calls, phrasing to avoid, and drafts of ad copy that are not ready to run as-is but gave me a real head start. When those accounts see our ads, the language in them will have come from people who sit in the same seats.

If you have a base of recorded sales conversations, you can copy the move. Pick the campaign, query the conversations with a tool like Ask Siro, and build the guide from what buyers actually said.

About the author: Jed Fudally is Director of Demand Generation at Siro, where he runs the paid and organic programs that put field sales teams in front of buyers. He previously helped scale G2's review engine from 50,000 to more than a million reviews.