Closing Opportunities by Aligning Marketing and Sales
Jon Miller
MarTech entrepreneur (3 exits), cofounder at Marketo and Engagio, board member, keynote speaker
According to TOPO’s 2019 Account Based Benchmark Report, the number one account-based success factor is the ability to coordinate programs across marketing, sales development, and sales.
SiriusDecisions found B2B organizations with tightly aligned marketing and sales operations grew their revenues 24 percent faster in a three-year period compared to those whose teams work separately. What’s more, these same companies increased their profits 27 percent faster during the same three-year period.
TOPO also reports that a whopping 90 percent of companies say that an account-based strategy drives better alignment between marketing and sales than a traditional go-to- market.
Misalignment creates waste
If marketing embraces Smarter GTM? without deep alignment with sales, the result is a set of isolated tactics that work against each other. Ad retargeting, direct mail pieces, and even field events are only moderately successful without full participation and enthusiasm from the entire revenue team.
On the flip side, when sales works a high-value account without support from marketing, the result is rogue reps generating their own account lists and writing their own emails— ultimately creating a disjointed customer experience.?
From baton pass to an orchestrated team
During the marketing automation era, marketing and sales alignment resembled a “baton pass” in a relay race. Marketing owned the top of the funnel, generating leads — which they would then pass to sales who, in turn, owned the deal close and post-sale growth.
This linear model worked at the time, especially for simple lead-based go-to-market strategies. But it is looking increasingly outdated in the face of an increasingly non-linear account journey.
Marketing is no longer the sole owner of top-of-funnel activity. New privacy regulations like GDPR and the rise of sales engagement tools like Outreach and Salesloft mean that many sales teams send more email than marketing.
Marketing is playing a bigger role at the bottom of the funnel. Larger buying committees mean that sales reps can’t possibly be talking to every stakeholder 1:1 during a sales cycle — yet talking with multiple personas is exactly what marketing is good at.?
Marketing must focus on post-sale revenue. The rise of recurring revenue models and the increased importance of expansion revenue mean that for most companies, the vast majority of revenue is generated after the initial sale — and yet many marketers still focus only on generating new business pipeline.?
An orchestrated process
Rather than a hand-off baton pass, in Smarter GTM? the marketing and sales departments operate as a team, unified by common Account Intelligence. Players have distinctly different positions — offense and defense — but they work together to pass the ball back and forth down the field to create and win new business and drive account growth.?
Three levels of alignment?
Companies attempting to move marketing and Sales towards the orchestrated movements of a well-practiced team go through three levels of maturity.?
Level 1. Communication via shared view of accounts?
74 percent of business buyers say sales’ awareness of marketing campaigns is important to win their business (Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer).
And yet, without an account intelligence foundation as discussed earlier, sales reps are blind to this critical information. Reps look at accounts in the CRM while marketing campaigns touch leads — they are literally not on the same page.
The answer is to give sales access to all the awesome information you’ve built in your account intelligence foundation: web visits, emails, campaign responses, predictive scores, intent keywords, technologies, and contacts, all matched to the right account. But don’t overwhelm the reps: make it easy by exposing the intelligence where they already spend a significant portion of their day, inside the CRM.
By creating a single view of all your account data, your sales and sales development reps can:
Territory and single-account views?
Give your reps a view of their territory which they can sort by the various scores from the FIRE methodology:
They should also be able to see where each account is in the account journey, and whether the account has an “in-market” prediction (e.g., Pipeline Predict Score).?
This can be an Account List view, a Report, and/or a Dashboard. Either way, it makes it easy for the rep to prioritize their days and know exactly where they should focus their efforts.
Reps should also be able to see all that information when looking at a single account, as well as an easy-to-understand snapshot of all the activities that have touched the account as it moves through the account journey (see next page).
Single account view
This is a powerful view that most sales reps haven’t seen before. When one VP of Enterprise Sales at a Demandbase customer saw it for the first time, he said: “I feel like I’ve been in the desert for 15 years, and you just showed up with a hotdog cart and lemonade stand.”
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Level 2. Activation via proactive alerts?
85 percent of B2B sales reps who receive alerts on opportunities say the alerts help them do their job better (Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer).
Most sales reps and SDRs appreciate email or Slack alerts about engagement or other account insights. This proactively tells them where they should focus and what actions they should take, without waiting for them to log into the CRM.
The list of possible alerts is only limited by the depth of your account intelligence. Ask your best SDRs and reps what they look for when prospecting, or what they wish they could know — and set up alerts for all the reps based on that.
Level 3. Orchestration via integrated plays?
“It’s easier to work in silos. You just don’t make as much money.” (Peter Herbert, CMO)
Breaking down the silos between Marketing and Sales isn’t easy — but it is always worth it. And it creates a much smarter account experience when interactions are orchestrated over time and across channels.
We covered orchestration heavily in the last section, but here we focus on the dance between the departments.
At the most basic level, sales reps should check if there is a marketing program running before calling an account. If marketing already emailed today, sales should use social media or the phone. When the sales rep delivers a consistent message in a complementary fashion, you get two touches for the price of one.?
From there, design integrated GTM plays that combine touches from marketing and sales Development, perhaps also sales and executives. Some simple examples:
Like a good football coach, we recommend that companies create a “playbook” of integrated plays that different accounts are entitled to, and then have marketing, sales, and SDRs meet regularly to discuss the accounts and “call the plays” they want to run. We call these meetings GTM Standups.?
You can download The B2B Marketing & Sales Orchestration Playbook to go deeper on orchestration and learn 20 orchestrated plays that you can utilize immediately.
Marketing and sales standups: the secret GTM weapon?
One of the easiest and most-impactful processes you can implement to drive your Smarter GTM? program and improve alignment is to set regular Marketing and Sales stand-ups.
In these standups, every week or two, a marketer meets 1:1 with each account executive and sales development rep for 5-10 minutes to share account intelligence, discuss how they are jointly going after accounts, and agree on go-forward actions. Nobody else should attend these meetings. These are not forecast meetings or management reviews; they are focused on sharing information and taking shared action.
Note: Your Marketing team may not have the resources to meet with each account executive every week or two. Try to maximize the number of reps you can support by keeping the standups short, but if necessary, pilot GTM Standups with a subset of reps, perhaps new ones or those with the biggest pipeline gaps. We recommend not reducing the frequency to less than every two weeks so you don’t lose momentum.?
Topics for each meeting include:
At Demandbase, our teams log into our application and review recent account activity and engagement looking at the same screen.
In addition to the regular stand-up meeting, it’s also useful to hold monthly Smarter GTM? “win rooms” to review metrics and set actions across the entire program, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to assess the entire program, consider changes to the account list, dive into metrics, and so on. These should involve leadership from both marketing and sales teams.?
What if you’re not aligned yet?
On the account-based journey, total alignment is the goal. But the important thing is to always make progress towards it. You can’t stop your revenue machine and put Smarter GTM? on hold until you’ve achieved perfect alignment.
So, get going now:
Start with a Smarter GTM? workshop — sit down together and discuss the account-based approach and why you need to change the way you work.
Use FIRE to align on target accounts — make sure you’re all aiming at the same target account list.
Agree on account entitlements and key metrics — agree on what commitments you’ll make to each other and how you’ll track success.
Pilot GTM Standups — nothing drives faster GTM success than just having marketing and sales meet regularly to talk about accounts.
Deliver intent and engagement insights to sales — deliver fast value by providing intelligence on the accounts you all care about.
If you do these five pretty easy things, you’ll be ahead of 80 percent of companies out there.?
Note: Above is an excerpt from my book, The Definitive Guide to Smarter GTM? with Account Intelligence and ABM/ABX. If you’d like your free copy, you can download it here.
Author | Marketer | Copywriter
2 年this is great Jon Miller...exactly what I need to read right now #abx