Securing a customer isn’t a job for one person, nor is it a job for a single department.
Traditionally, marketing and sales departments have been assigned the most customer involvement (except, of course, customer service), in terms of locating new leads and securing new business. As these two teams are intrinsically responsible for — and also work toward — a similar goal, the opportunity for synergy is significant.
Jenny Coupe, vice president of revenue marketing at ActiveCampaign, would agree. While past practices may have relieved marketing teams of their role once a lead provides an intent to purchase, she sees sales typically entering the picture at the evaluation and purchase stage these days.
Similarly, marketing and sales are often involved in planning, where both teams develop pipeline goals and address KPIs from the outset. It is, therefore, a best practice to keep both teams informed from the outset of the pipeline strategy, to ensure goals and expectations are agreed upon and clearly understood.
“If marketing and sales teams can successfully align on a revenue-centric motion, you see a higher return on your marketing return on investment, improved sales efficiency and overall growth,” Coupe said.
In Jenny Coupe’s experience with ActiveCampaign, determining the right questions and finding their answers is key to successful planning and alignment with sales.
In your experience, what are the main causes for misalignment between sales and marketing teams?
It’s important to have a mutually agreed-upon definition of success. This includes roles and responsibilities as well as key hand-off points. It is common to look at a funnel view or a lead-to-deal framework and assign ownership. Key stages of the funnel include awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and purchase.
A decade ago, marketing was only responsible for awareness and intent, but now the handoff from marketing occurs much later — sales now typically enters the picture at the evaluation and purchase stage. With these changes, it’s important to establish clear operational processes including service level agreements (SLAs) that define what each team is accountable for delivering and how that impacts the bottom line. If you are not aligned out of the gate on key areas such as lead definition, criteria for a sales accepted lead and revenue responsibility, you will find yourself marching down two different paths. This leads to a confusing message in the marketplace and an overall disruptive experience for your customer.
How do you create a common set of metrics to measure success to ensure the rubric is understandable to both teams?
It’s important to define a framework together that includes a set of metrics that measure outcomes including goals and targets. A framework will ensure that everyone is aligned to the same key performance indicators. It starts with defining key metrics such as lead definition, lead acceptance criteria, pipeline and revenue responsibility. In addition to a common set of metrics, processes and systems play an important role.
Key areas to consider include, for example, whether there is an agreed-upon number of marketing qualified leads that sales can expect, whether there is alignment on the criteria for deal creation, what systems are in place to measure and forecast the business, and whether leads have been modeled to capacity to ensure sales coverage and support.
If marketing and sales teams can successfully align on a revenue-centric motion, you see a higher return on your marketing return on investment, improved sales efficiency and overall growth.
At the end of the day, sales and marketing should be a partnership and viewed as a ‘win-together, lose-together’ relationship.”
What’s the best way to maintain alignment between sales and marketing teams in the long term?
Maintaining sales and marketing alignment needs to be operational, strategic and include many other key business functions. Those functions include targets. Who are we trying to acquire as customers, and why? Are we aligned on our key company differentiators? Do we have an ideal customer profile? Who is the decision maker?
When it comes to planning, there are equally important questions to answer. What are the goals? What is each team expected to deliver? Are we aligned to the business? How are forecasts established? When and how are these shared and communicated? Is finance included to ensure alignment to the business?
There are important lessons to be learned from project post-mortems, which should also influence how sales and marketing teams plan future deals. Are you reviewing the pipeline together? Do you understand how and why deals move up or out? Is there agreement in criteria for stage progression, and when or why a deal is categorized as lost?
Additional post-mortem and hindsight review can help analyze previous successes and areas for improvement. Is there a process for reviewing won and lost business? Does this include both sales and marketing? Are you driving toward actionable insights that can improve efficiency?
At the end of the day, sales and marketing should be a partnership and viewed as a “win-together, lose-together” relationship. Both are critical to grow and scale the business.
