If you’ve been in B2B for more than a few years, you’ve seen examples of the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to marketing and sales alignment. At one end of the spectrum, you have leadership working in lock step to ensure the business is scaling quickly. At the other, infighting and losses in productivity.
Research has proven that alignment translates into better results. If sales trusts marketing, they’re willing to put more effort into lead follow-up, leading to 200% more marketing-driven revenue growth than misaligned teams. Other benefits include 38% higher opportunity win rates, 27% faster three-year profit growth, and 36% higher customer retention.
Marketing and sales are naturally mismatched when it comes to focal points and skill sets, and some tension is a good thing. Marketing’s mission is to attract the right buyers at the right time, regardless of territory distribution. Overall pipeline and bookings attainment is critical to the company’s success. Each salesperson is focused on making their number every month or quarter. Every sale is a team effort, and if one territory is neglected, marketing is pushed to improve.
Considering that you have a 90% probability of misalignment of sales and marketing in your organization, it’s time to implement best practices that I’ve seen produce better results and happier practitioners on both sides of the aisle.
Align Their Goals
Many marketing leaders are held to a marketing qualified lead goal because they aren’t able to implement a multi-touch attribution model the rest of the business can trust. A lead volume goal can lead to some ugly misbehavior throughout the marketing ranks, and incentivizes your team to ignore sales complaints about quality control.
As someone who has supported both marketing and sales, I can tell you that lead volume is a vanity metric when compared to conversion rates and pipeline production.
Hold both marketing and sales leadership accountable for the topline pipeline and bookings numbers. Train your marketing team to look at leads as a leading indicator of pipeline and pipeline a leading indicator of bookings. When you can shift their focus to top line numbers that are in better alignment with what you’re trying to achieve as a business, they’ll start reacting faster to lagging pipeline numbers and focusing on efforts that will generate the output you’re looking for: bookings.
Honestly Evaluate the Impact of Your Existing Goals
Let’s say you’ve seen the light and agree that marketing qualified leads isn’t the best metric to incentivize marketing, but you’re not bought in on multi-touch attribution. Instead you use a first or last touch model to attribute who gets credit for the opportunity and push your departments on their pipeline and bookings numbers accordingly.
If this describes your key performance indicators, you’ve set your teams to analyze and argue over every single deal. The only thing worse than arguing over which department gets credit for pipeline and revenue by source is compensating teams on their pipeline generation numbers. I guarantee that flavor of opportunity source tracking will lead to wasted cycles your operations teams could otherwise spend on identifying friction in your sales process and fixing it.
We mean well when we create compensation plans and goals. Our aim is to create the right behavior and improve performance. Business leaders need to get better at recognizing when a goal has an unintended negative outcome and pivot to better alternatives.
Fix the Friction
One of the simplest ways to solve petty bickering between sales and marketing teams is to assign a neutral party–like revenue operations–to inspect the handoff process and data definitions used by these teams. Getting people in a room together to agree over a definition of something like a “lead” seems tedious, but it’s absolutely essential to alignment.
In my experience, any ambiguity over what a lead is can escalate into hatred. I wish I was exaggerating! Sales has one definition, marketing has another, and if they don’t align, sales thinks that marketing is padding their numbers with garbage and marketing thinks sales is too lazy to follow up on good opportunities.
Take the time to nail the basics. Then reevaluate whether people are adhering to the newly defined metrics and processes on a regular basis.
Marketing: Balance Long- and Short-Term Outputs
Holding marketing to a topline pipeline and bookings number will motivate them to think more about the big picture. It isn’t a substitute for a day in the life of a salesperson. No one feels the tremendous pressure of hitting quota or risking an income your family depends on like a salesperson. The stress felt by salespeople can manifest as badgering marketers for more “at bats” and it’s easy to lose empathy for a salesperson’s struggle.
A lot of marketing tactics don’t produce leads and pipeline immediately, and it’s still necessary to dedicate resources to doing them. However, marketers need to get better about diverting enough resources to tactics that produce today so their salespeople don’t starve in the meantime.
Sales: Don’t Puppy Guard
In order for marketing’s efforts to resonate with your target buyers, they need to understand the motivations behind their purchases and the language they use to describe their problems and solutions. The best way for marketers to nail the language and emotion behind the selling process is to have the opportunity to interact with your prospects and customer base.
Letting them stand at your trade show booth isn’t going to be enough. Marketers need access to accounts in order to run closed lost and closed won opportunity analysis. This will help your product marketer determine if there are gaps in your messaging or feature issues that need to be escalated. They also need to sit on calls–or at the very least, listen to recordings–so they can figure out when a message is a hit or a miss.
Closing deals is a team sport. Marketing needs to soften the ground for sales by building awareness and providing them with the content, customer evidence, and credibility they need to win over the hearts and minds of your prospects. When things slow down in the market, it’s a perfect time to reevaluate what’s working and what isn’t – and improving the relationship between your sales and marketing teams is a fantastic place to start.
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