The fact that we keep talking about getting sales and marketing to collaborate more effectively is an indication that we are far from solving the problem (or should we say, taking advantage of the opportunity). Here are five specific shortcuts to help your organization (or your clients) accelerate their path toward sales and marketing collaboration nirvana.
1. Common objectives
It starts with what you’re working toward. Traditionally, sales is responsible for sales and marketing is responsible for leads. That may still be operationally true, but marketing needs to be comfortable with sales and revenue as the lagging indicators of their success. Yes, the sales team is required to achieve those goals. And the leading indicators of success, the short-term deliverables, will be leads and case studies and microsites and the like. But sales and marketing must first agree on a common set of well-defined outcomes. This is the grounding that becomes the basis for all other work, discussions, triage and execution.
2. Common definitions
With sales as the output, it’s important for sales and marketing to agree on definitions and standards for the critical steps and deliverables that lead to sales. For example, what qualifies as a lead? What qualifies as a short-term sales opportunity? Your common definitions will manifest themselves in a single dashboard to measure, review and improve results. It starts with a model that predicts the sales or revenue result. How many opportunities are required to get a sale? How many leads to get an opportunity? By combining this model with common definitions of each deliverable and stage, both sales and marketing have a clear understanding of what’s required to achieve success. All other inputs, opportunities and distractions are triaged based on those goals, metrics and definitions.
3. Common compensation/ objectives
This one is controversial, but is a natural next step if both sales and marketing have common objectives and definitions of success. Sales is most likely measured largely on their success in driving new business. Why shouldn’t marketing be similarly compensated? If you’re nervous about taking this step, start small. Give marketing a goal in line with your objectives and definitions, then give them a percentage of the “lift” achieved above and beyond that. For example, let’s say you expect to generate 3,000 leads per month with a $30,000/month budget. What if the marketing team can generate the same leads for less? Would you give them a percentage of the budget difference as a bonus? What about if they generated more leads for the same budget? Would you give them a percentage of resulting sales commissions as a bonus? Worth thinking about.
4. Upfront planning
What if you treated the marketing planning process as if it were a proposal to a customer? Marketing doesn’t work for sales, but in many companies the primary “customer” for marketing is in fact the sales organization. So if that’s the case, it seems appropriate that the marketing plan each year should at minimum be reviewed and “accepted” by sales leadership as sufficient to help them achieve their own growth objectives. This doesn’t mean that sales has complete veto power over strategies and tactics. The “means” by which marketing achieves collective goals agreed to by sales and marketing together should continue to be, ultimately, up to the marketing team.
5. Daily/weekly triage
Even with the best-laid plans, things will go wrong. Problems will pop up. Tests will fail, campaigns will fall flat. Assumptions will be made, loyalties questioned. And new opportunities will be identified or discovered. For these and many reasons, it’s important to have regular, metrics-based reviews of what’s working and what’s not, as well as a forum to capture and review new ideas to determine which of them should be implemented quickly and which should stay on the side burner (at least for now).
Author and award-winning blogger Matt Heinz is president of Heinz Marketing, to which he brings 15 years of marketing, business development and sales experience. He blogs at HeinzMarketing.com.
