Trust starts at home when it comes to sales and marketing alignment. How your corporate teams relate to each other predicts whether your B2B organization can develop and build trust with your channel partners.
Even as the B2B industry evolves, relationships are still a central part of how business gets done. A B2B organization with a finely tuned growth engine has strong connections at its core.
The relationships between corporate sales and marketing teams, field teams and channel partners, and channel partners and customers/buyers, are built on trust. It’s the lubricant that makes sure all the parts of the B2B marketing strategy move smoothly. Without trust, everything grinds to a halt.
The challenge for many companies is that unlike sales figures or marketing budgets, trust is almost never measured — leaders manage it on assumption. And, unfortunately, as our 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic data shows, those assumptions are usually wrong. They’re often about the channel, and most revealingly about what’s happening within corporate itself.
In our Diagnostic, we use qualitative and quantitative surveys to evaluate the points of misalignment within a B2B company’s corporate teams and channel partners, measuring the responses on a 5-point scale (with 1 low and 5 high). One key aspect we assess are Relationship Drivers, which measure trust across the whole system: inside corporate (between sales and marketing), inside the channel (within each dealership, for example), and between corporate and the channel. Relationship Drivers are the third area we assess in our Diagnostic, alongside Business Drivers (brand strength), Operational Drivers (capacity and resourcing), and Go-to-Market Drivers (sales and marketing effectiveness).
When we assessed two separate manufacturers, the numbers told a single, consistent story: that trust starts not at the channel, but inside corporate headquarters.
What healthy trust looks like for sales and marketing alignment
At the first manufacturing company, trust was in good shape almost everywhere we looked. Inside corporate, the score was a solid 3.8 (on a 5-point scale). Inside their dealerships, the score was a touch higher at 4.0. And the two sides read each other almost as warmly as they rated themselves, with both corporate and channel respondents rating their relationship in the mid 3s.
This is a B2B organization where trust is real, mutual, and fairly visible to everyone in it. Corporate still slightly underestimated the goodwill its dealers held (we see the tendency to under-read the channel even in healthy organizations), but the gap was narrow. The first manufacturing company is an example of what “good” looks like in a B2B company; not perfect alignment, but a foundation of mutual trust that the rest of the organization can run on pretty smoothly.
When the house isn’t in order
The second manufacturing company shows what happens when that foundation of mutual trust is missing. Inside corporate, trust was a low 2.7, indicating that the corporate sales and marketing teams barely trust one another.
That same organization was blind to an enormous reservoir of dealer goodwill. It rated the corporate-channel relationship at just 1.6, assuming the channel had written it off. The dealers? They rated it 4. Corporate was sitting on more than two and a half points of goodwill it couldn’t see.
Notice the pattern across both companies: Corporate teams underestimate how much the channel trusts them. But the magnitude of that gap in understanding parallels corporate’s own internal health.
When there’s mutual trust between sales and marketing teams inside corporate, there’s only a small blind spot for how they assume their channel partners see their relationship. But when there’s distrust inside corporate, that extends toward the channel too, creating a perception gap.
Essentially, if corporate HQ is mired in internal distrust, those teams project their suspicion outward. Because corporate’s own people don’t trust each other, they assume no one else does either and they miss the genuine goodwill their channel partners are extending.
Trust starts at corporate HQ
For many B2B companies, this realization reframes how they need to think about their channel partner relationships. The health of your external relationships is an extension of the health of your internal ones. Corporate sales and marketing teams can’t extend trust to partners if there’s no trust within HQ.
So how do you build that trust? Someone in corporate has to make the first move.
In our decades of working with B2B companies, we’ve seen that tight sales and marketing alignment — and loyalty — flows toward the party that demonstrates it first. The organizations with the most channel partner loyalty are the ones that visibly invest in it. And that starts with being an organization worth trusting from the inside out.
How to improve your Relationship Drivers to drive better sales and marketing alignment:
- First, measure current levels of trust. Evaluate where your teams are today. Ask each group — corporate sales, corporate marketing, and your channel partners — how much they trust the others; then compare those answers to what each group assumes. The gaps between what people feel and what teams assume are where both your risk and your opportunity live.
- Second, if you find unspent goodwill, spend it. Trust that goes uninvested quietly decays. If your channel partners trust you more than you thought (and our research indicates that they probably do), make the bigger ask, share more openly, move faster together.
- Third, fix your own house first. Audit trust within corporate sales and marketing teams; your internal number predicts how accurately you’re reading your partners. A team that doesn’t trust itself tends to misjudge everyone around it.
See your own score. The 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic reveals the specific areas where internal misalignment may be creating friction within your B2B organization and limiting your growth potential. Take the 2RM Catalyst Diagnostic assessment to see where your corporate and channel teams are disconnected and where you can drive your business forward.
By Two Rivers Marketing
By April English