Align sales and marketing to double growth the of your business

Research by martech giant Marketo reinforces what all seasoned B2B marketers have understood for a long time, that the alignment of sales with marketing drives stronger sales performance.

So, let’s do it! I hear you say. Well, saying it and making it happen effectively are often separated by a massive “how?”.

In this post, I will address the “how?” element. I will share my 7Cs self-assessment framework you can use today to identify how well your sales and marketing teams are aligned and areas for improvement. I have then provided simple and practical strategies you can implement now to create a stronger team to win more opportunities and drive more revenue growth efficiently.

Step 1: A simple self-assessment framework to test how aligned your sales and marketing really are

You may already feel that your departments are aligned, but how true is this? Use the 7Cs model to review your sales and marketing across seven categories. Try to objectively score your business out of 5 stars for how you perform in each area. Lower scores will obviously need more work and higher scores require refinement.

Comprehend

How well do your sales and marketing functions understand each other’s roles and how they fit together? Do they feel that they can live without each other? Do they respect each other?

There are plenty of examples of the “Lone Wolf” salesperson who operates on their own, but we know from almost every study that this is not the best way of getting results. Similarly, I have seen plenty of examples of marketing teams producing campaigns that fall flat because they haven’t fully considered what the sales team needs to close the deal. During the course of my career, I have not yet seen a B2B marketing professional who can work effectively without involvement of a highly engaged sales team.

When looking at your own business, try to think about how often your sales and marketing teams show an empathy for the role each may play when tasked with a common challenge. What value do they put on each other’s roles and is this a shared view?

Customer

Consider how hard your sales and marketing teams work towards understanding their existing clients and target audiences?

Through my work in defining personas, I have found that there is a fundamental difference in how marketing and sales approach the question of how they describe an ideal customer and their needs. Marketing professionals will often refer to data from a larger population seeking to identify common factors with the intent of creating identifiable and reachable target groupings. On the other hand, a sales person will most commonly draw from their most current interactions with clients / prospects. This is a reflection of their natural tendency towards identifying unique requirements of each individual opportunity in order to create a hook that they can tailor their response to. Neither of these approaches are wrong, but you can see weaknesses in both and how a blended approach would benefit your business. What you are looking for is a marketing person that can draw on personal client experience and sales experts who can identify common challenges and needs.

Most importantly, once they have identified these characteristics, how capable are they of placing the customer at the heart of their plans, activities and actions?

Communicate

Quite simply put, how frequently do they communicate with one another and what is the quality of the communication? How constructive is the communication and what is the result?

Challenge

How effective are they at challenging one another’s approach and understanding of a situation in a positive way? Furthermore, how do they respond when challenged?

Collaborate

You may be giving yourself a pat on the back for having a regular joint sales and marketing meeting, but ask yourself how good are these? I’ve seen too many of these congregations where each of the sales team list their own pipeline and tasks for the coming period and then marketing describing their campaigns and activities. Everyone is so focused on their own agenda and even trying to avoid too much scrutiny, especially if the results have not yet come in as expected. Is this your business?

Ask yourself, are all the attendees actively listening to each other? Does the environment lend itself to being constructive and enable each attendee to reach out to the rest of the group for ideas and support when they need it most?

Furthermore, collaboration is not restricted to pre-defined meetings. How do your sales and marketing experts collaborate day-to-day? Are they magnetically drawn towards each other to work towards a unifying and commonly understood goal?

Cohabit

Whilst this year may give us cause to rethink this facet of alignment, it still remains relevant. Whilst simply putting people together does not guarantee success, proximity undeniably enables a higher level of integration if both practices. Having worked in offices where this has been the case, I have always found it beneficial, and ideally linked with front-line customer services too. The reason being that you get a continual unfiltered and immediate feedback loop on the customer user experience with a constant source of client interaction. Today this has taken on a more virtual meaning, but it is now more possible than ever to integrate sales and marketing in client and company level Zoom calls. If it is safe to do so, are people able to work from the office? Do you try and create a blend of functions to be present together? As an example, some companies are having staff come in on fortnightly shifts and effectively working in their bubbles and under socially distanced and sanitary conditions. Incidentally, this technique is being implemented by schools who need to find ways of getting their students back into face-to-face education as it has been recognised that social presence is a key element of learning.

Command

OK, so this one is a bit of a cheat to maintain the “C-framework” theme. What I really mean here is “Leadership”. In other words, who is directing the whole show and bringing things together? Who do your marketing and sales functions report into? Does marketing report into a Chief Marketing Officer and sales to a Chief Sales Officer? Or do both report into common senior leader such as a Director of Sales and Marketing? In either case, where is the leaning of the leadership? B2B environments are typically more likely emphasise the sales element and business decisions will be based more on this bias. Does the sales lead give credit to, or fully understand the marketing process? In my experience the best performing sales professionals are open minded and able to embrace multiple concepts including the ability to trust their marketing team. Similarly, the best marketing professionals also feature heavily in the sales process, often taking a visible role with clients. Where does your business growth leadership tend towards and how well is it balanced?

How did your business score?

What was your overall score out of a possible 35? What areas are the strongest and which need the most development? How honest were you with you scoring?

Step 2: Implement simple and practical solutions to create a stronger alignment for stronger sales and marketing performance

It wouldn’t be right to take you down the path of taking a self-assessment without giving you some tools to help you make improvements and get you on your way.

Promote Customer Centric thinking

Keep the customer at the centre of every decision. Engage your sales and marketing teams with the challenge of identifying your key customer types, drawing on the data analytics approach from marketing and using sales to provide real world customer examples to add colour to these customer types. Aim to get everyone to understand their motivations on a more personal level. Encourage everyone to provide input and challenging of conventional thinking or if there is too much reliance on one single client. It is very easy for examples to be provided based on either the largest or the most recent client engagements. Encourage them to think deeper to identify commonalities and key challenges. Use this to help with the creation of helpful tools such as Persona building, Proposition creation, Features and Buying mechanisms.

Joint Sales Visits / Web Calls

Introducing joint meetings with a sales and marketing person present is extremely beneficial. Through this process, marketing and sales are able to identify the different needs and use this information to shape further developments. To make this work it is vital that the roles are clearly defined for the meeting so that you each have a purpose and are not treading on each other's feet. Most importantly this creates a shared understanding of the market.

Walk through the customer experience together

Take both the sales and marketing team through the customer experience. Walk the floor to identify areas of your product, service or business that need improving. Allocate tasks and points of cooperation.

"It is fair to say that over the years the lines between sales and marketing roles have blurred considerably. Only this week I received a sales call and demonstration from the head of marketing for a demand generation business. Go back five years ago and I doubt you would have seen a marketing professional taking such a forward lead in business development. In my personal view this is a good thing, but how do you manage and clearly identify roles and responsibilities, or when this approach is most effective?" 

Define roles clearly

Set out clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Given the blurring of sales and marketing, it is still helpful to understand when you will want either marketing or sales to lead and where you want the other to provide support.

Identify their roles in relation Demand Generation, Social Media postings, Lead Generation, Responding to leads, Account Based Marketing, Closing, etc. One area where I repeatedly see problems arising is in sales and marketing data administration. If I am brutally honest, it tends to be around the information being recorded by sales teams, invariably those who are highly diligent and those who are more lax. Expecting a salesperson to be the best at recording data may be a step too far, but it should be a requirement of their role in this new world. I have seen that recording of information and actions is affected most in situations where new systems have been implemented without training or time invested in on-boarding staff. Especially if there is a lack of understanding of the process or reasoning behind the process. This leads to apathy when it comes to recording activities or keeping data clean. So make sure you gain agreement and understanding of who is responsible for recording what information, expectations and purpose. Get this right and everyone wins.

Build your technology stack to support alignment

Technology is great as it enables greater interaction. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the majority of integrated Sales and Marketing systems, but with so many specialist tech solutions out there now (8000 and counting), supporting the entire funnel and customer experience, it can become complicated for internal users about which ones they need to be using and where. My general rule is to keep it as simple and lean as possible. Adding tech only where it makes sense.

Having a martech stack that enables closer communication and collaboration between sales and marketing at a contact, account and opportunity level is immensely powerful. Making sure that everyone follows protocol and uses the tools provided will be an ongoing process of continual improvement. However, this investment will mean the quality of your data, decision making and solutions are able to improve proportionally.

Be smart about how you reward and measure success

It is important to fully understand, that even in the most direct B2B transaction, the idea that the sale could solely be attributed to the efforts of a single person, so why do most companies focus so much reward on the individual sales person?

Two reasons really; The first being that it is traditionally believed that commission is a primary motivational factor for sales people. The second being that it is regularly seen by companies as being too challenging to attribute other contributing factors from the client journey to accurately compensate those involved. It’s also relatively easy to compensate the sales person as they are often the one who is present when the client agrees to the sale and records the sale. We are now in a position to rethink this model.

The first belief regarding sales people’s commission and motivation can be easily unpicked. I have seen this in practice having worked for a company who had sales people on a basic salary and the same bonus system as the rest of the business who outperform their commission focussed sales colleagues.

The second challenge is now a lot more easily resolved with marketing technology able to track each interaction from initial contact to closing and additional account development. Each contributor can now be recognised for their contribution. Whether this from the demand generation activities that enticed the person to visit the company website, the way the proposition was communicated so that it addressed their need encouraged them to register their interest, the development of content that supported their research and the prompt response from their registered phone call. The webinar they attended, the various calls, meetings and bespoke emails responding to their questions through the sales process and the continued delivery of the service to the agreed standards that meant they remained a loyal client. All these things can be measured and recognised.

Introducing Account Based Marketing campaigns

Account Based Marketing (ABM) by its very nature guides both sales and marketing teams to perform to a high level in each of the areas defined in the 7Cs framework.

The process of developing an ABM campaign naturally takes you down a path of alignment as it simply requires the joint engagement of sales and marketing throughout the campaign development and working together throughout the customer journey.

If you are interested to find out more about ABM and the process of building an ABM campaign, then watch this space as I will be sharing my thoughts on this platform.

Conclusion

At this point in time marketing and sales are more important to the survival of businesses. It is therefore essential that they are working as efficiently and effectively as possible together and it is the responsibility of the business leaders to create an environment that enables this.

By following the self-assessment and implementing solutions identified above will help you to create a coordinated sales and marketing entity which fully understands its clients and their present challenges, is able to develop compelling solutions to address these, work together to take these to market and progress opportunities through every stage of the funnel. Ultimately helping you to increase the number of higher quality leads and convert more of these opportunities into sales – growing your business without having to increase spend.

Of course the strategies I have identified to enable alignment of marketing and sales are not the only options available to you and I encourage you to think of additional ways to achieve this goal.

The sales and marketing 7Cs self-assessment framework identifies how well your sales and marketing teams are aligned. Practical tools you can implement to help sales and marketing win more opportunities and drive more revenue growth.

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