MARKETING CREATES THE PROMISE
Your advert convinced the customer. Your salesperson could not.
No department reports that failure, because it does not sit inside one. Marketing reports enquiries. Sales reports pressure from the market. Both reports can be accurate while the business loses money between them.
Alignment Meetings Are Common. Defended Promises Are Rare.
Most sales and marketing problems are not alignment problems at all. Marketing is permitted to make claims it will never have to defend in a room with a customer. Sales is then expected to carry those claims without being handed anything to prove them with. So the salesperson does what anyone would under pressure: drops the claim, falls back on price, and comes to management for a discount approval.
This is also why campaign reviews reach the wrong verdict. Leadership examines the creative, the media choice and the budget. The campaign was often fine. The attention it created arrived at a conversation that could not carry it.
What Ghanaian Buyers Do Before They Commit
Buyers in Ghana and across the continent rarely reject you outright. They test you. A small first order instead of the full contract. A query to the general line to see how fast a reply comes. A quiet call to someone who already works with you.
Every one of those is a proof request, and no advert can answer it. Only the person in the room can. In a market where references decide contracts, an unprovable claim reads not as weak marketing but as a reason to be careful.
The Proof Shelf
Every claim a business takes to market needs a matching item on what I call the proof shelf: something a salesperson can lift into the conversation the moment a customer asks for evidence.
- A number operations or finance will stand behind.
- A named reference the customer is permitted to call.
- A document: a report, licence, certificate, specification or audited result.
- A demonstration, pilot, sample or site visit.
- A commitment the business accepts in writing, such as a service level, a timeline or a guarantee.
Then run the ratio. Write down the five strongest claims your marketing makes. Ask three salespeople to produce, cold, the proof a customer would accept for each one. Count how many of the five survive. That figure is your claim-to-proof ratio, and it predicts your discount rate more reliably than your price list does.
Most teams find the same thing. The claims are bold and the shelf is thin.
Four Changes Worth Making This Week
- Make the shelf a condition of launch. No claim reaches the market without a named proof and a named owner. Marketing presents the claims; the Head of Sales signs that each one can be defended in the room.
- Audit your top five claims this week. The Head of Sales picks three salespeople and asks each to prove the claims as a sceptical customer would. One number for the next management meeting: claims proved out of five.
- Let sales write the next brief. The objections your team heard last month are better campaign input than any internal brainstorm. Twenty minutes a month, Head of Sales to Marketing: the three objections heard most often, in the customer's words.
- Change what the commercial meeting reviews. Retire “leads generated” as a headline number. Replace it with two: hours to first response, and the share of first meetings where the core claim was proved rather than repeated.
Where the Cost Actually Appears
This never appears on a report as a marketing failure. It appears as a longer sales cycle, a higher average discount, negotiations that run three rounds instead of one, and a win rate that will not move even as enquiries rise. Marketing spend increases, revenue stays flat, and leadership concludes that the market has become difficult. The market has not become difficult. The promise was unfunded.
Marketing creates the promise. Sales proves it. A business that funds the first and neglects the second pays twice for every sale: once to attract the customer, once in discount to keep them.
The Question for Your Next Management Meeting
Take your single strongest marketing claim: can your sales team prove it, or only repeat it?
If your enquiries are rising while your win rate and margin stay flat, the problem is more likely the handover than the market. MGA Consulting Ghana Limited runs a Promise-to-Proof Audit for banks, insurers, professional services firms and growing enterprises: every market-facing claim mapped to the proof your team can produce in the room. Begin at mgaconsultingltd.com. More of this series at michaelabbiw.com.
