What's Missing In Marketing and Sales Alignment?

Sales and marketing teams are often viewed as two gears in the same machine. While they may have different approaches, they ultimately share a common goal: generating revenue. When these two critical departments aren't aligned, inefficiencies and wasted resources are often the result.

To align sales and marketing effectively, both teams need to work with a KPI that is valuable and relevant to both. Here, I introduce the Lead Relevance Rate (LRR)—a metric that can help bridge the alignment gap.

Why LRR?

The main challenge for sales and marketing alignment is their different goals, metrics, and methods of communication. Marketing usually focuses on creating engagement and generating leads, while sales is concerned with converting those leads into deals.

Because of these differences, they end up having different processes and evaluation methods. Currently, the Lead Call-Through Rate (LCTR) is often used to measure lead quality, but this approach is limited. LCTR only measures the immediate outcome of sales outreach, without accounting for the long-term value, or the effectiveness of marketing activities.

What's more, LCTR can be affected by many factors, such as outreach methods, messaging quality, and timing—all of which are largely controlled by sales teams and external factors. Holding marketing accountable for a low LCTR is unfair and can lead to missed opportunities, as many potentially valuable leads get disregarded.

In contrast, Lead Relevance Rate (LRR) serves as a balanced KPI that benefits both marketing and sales:

- For marketing: LRR measures whether marketing campaigns are delivering the right content to the right audience and if their efforts are leading to improvements over time.

- For sales: LRR allows for a deeper analysis of lead qualification. It encourages sales teams to provide timely feedback to marketing and to assess leads in more detail rather than just relying on LCTR.

By focusing on LRR, both teams are encouraged to work together towards shared goals. This minimizes misalignment and allows for better optimization of the lead pipeline.

How to Adopt LRR for Sales and Marketing Alignment

1.Build A Lead Scoring System

The first step is to define lead qualification for Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that both teams can agree on.

• Set baseline factors that impact lead quality. The scoring system can be as simple or as complex as needed to fit business objectives. For example, for an IT device company, profession and seniority can be the baseline qualifications for relevant leads.

• Categorize Lead Relevance by priority level. Assign scores to each lead and categorize them into priority levels based on score ranges. This helps create different levels of lead relevance:

- Level 1: Highly relevant and top priority

- Level 2: Potential opportunities

- Level 3: Irrelevant

• Track LRR by priority level. Focus on the MoM variation, and the optimization efforts put to the improvement, or the reason for LRR decline.

2. Establish a Timely Feedback Loop

In the lead relevance feedback, sales teams can highlight the factors that contribute to low-quality leads in the Lead Scoring System and identify potential leads that may be outside their usual comfort zones.

This type of feedback allows marketing to make more precise adjustments that ultimately benefit both teams. The focus should remain on identifying opportunities rather than placing blame.

3. Optimize Marketing Activities

Marketing should take this feedback and apply it to campaign improvements. This involves refining audience targeting and optimizing content based on LRR insights.

• Success Case - Lead Gen Campaign Optimization

An IT hardware company sought to find computer network customers in overseas markets through LinkedIn ad campaigns.

Challenge - Initially, the company targeted high-level decision makers and procurement departments, using a mix of industry categories and member skills in their targeting setup. The campaign content focused heavily on product selling, offering little perceived value. Consequently, lead quality was low, reflected in a single-digit Lead Relevance Rate (LRR) and a high Cost Per Lead (CPL).

Solution - By optimizing targeting based on sales feedback, the company refined its audience to focus on relevant industries (e.g., telecom, wireless industries) rather than job titles. They also added exclusions for competitor and irrelevant industries (e.g., computer hardware, electronics) and certain traits (e.g., job seeking, retired) marked as low priority (Level 3).

Content was also adjusted—from being product-centric to being solution-centric, emphasizing value in application scenarios (e.g., smart security network solution, smart school network solution) relevant to the target customers' pain points.

Result - The campaign's CTR improved by 67%, CPL dropped by 58%, and overall LRR increased to 33%.

Conclusion

Lead Relevance Rate (LRR) is a unified metric that adds value for both marketing and sales teams, fostering a culture of shared accountability. This collaborative approach not only improves lead quality but also supports sustainable revenue growth for the entire organization.

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