Five Keys to Sales & Marketing Alignment

One of the most oft-discussed issues in B2B businesses today is around the imperative for sales & marketing alignment. Today, I gave a talk at the SaaStr Europa event where I shared five key “lessons learned,” based on experiences gained from helping scale two different businesses from $10M ARR to over $100M. Hope that you find these useful.?

First off, I think it’s important to have a shared definition of what, exactly, is Sales & Marketing alignment?? A definition that works for me is:?

Sales and marketing alignment is a shared system of strategy, communication, execution, and goals that enable sales & marketing to operate as a unified team. Working together, aligned teams can deliver high-impact marketing activities, boost sales effectiveness, and ultimately grow revenue.

What’s noteworthy is that whether a company has five account executives, for five thousand AE’s, most companies don’t have an actual system or process here. And it’s very hard to scale a process that’s not well-defined. Moreover, the process for sales and marketing alignment that worked when the business was smaller likely needs constant reinvention as the business scales.???

Nonetheless, achieving this alignment is critical, especially in today’s economy, where the premium on driving efficient growth is higher than ever. For example, the Alexander Group recently reported that only 35% of B2B reps in the technology vertical achieved quota last year. And only 65% of the content generated by marketing is ever used by sales (source: Forrester). When we work to understand the root cause of these issues, we typically find that most companies don’t deeply align on goals, don’t have a system to scale winning rep behaviors, and have poor systems of communication. So there's a large degree of upside when it comes to efficient growth.???

THE OPPORTUNITY

According to Forrester, companies that align sales and marketing teams achieve 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster profit growth. And let’s face it: it’s more fun to have a highly functional go to market team.??

THE FIVE IMPERATIVES

I. SHARED GOALS

Shared goals are hard: the two teams often have different growth horizons (one vs? 3-year ARR growth), and historically operate at different stages of the buyer’s journey, such as the top of funnel, or bottom of the funnel.?

What we see from winning teams are two repeatable best practices:

Shared Scorecard. It’s not enough to have a shared dashboard for the top-line growth targets. These two teams need a single source of truth for detailed targets on, for example, pipeline growth and conversion, so that teams know where there are potential gaps at every stage of pipeline generation – this could be, for example, getting into the granular details of pipeline by customer segment or industry.

Seller Confidence Surveys. Another key tactic to align on goals is to have a shared baseline understanding of seller confidence. Using a 3rd party survey tool with a questionnaire that is jointly authored by sales and marketing leadership can shine the light on rep confidence in pricing, differentiation, negotiation skills, and more. When done correctly, sales and marketing align on improving areas that drive higher performance, together as one team.?

II. TRUST: OPEN & REAL COMMUNICATIONS

Having shared goals isn’t enough. It’s about trust, and the ability to be open & real about the business. And it starts at the top. Based on conversations with 20+ sales and marketing leaders, we hear time and again that the relationship between the heads of sales and marketing is critical. It requires proactive investment by both parties. When there’s trust at the “top”, it allows for:

• Tough, open, and real discussions on the state of the business and where we need to improve execution
• The ability to to “disagree and commit”. 'Nuf said.
• And ultimately, we’re modeling the behavior that we want to scale across the organization

III. ONE NARRATIVE

We often see a chasm between the CEO/Marketing "vision story” of the company,? and what reps on the front line say everyday.? As marketers, we’ll spend dozens of hours crafting the perfect “TED Talk” on vision, and competitive differentiation for the company or product line.? These talks often have a way of becoming the default customer overview deck that we expect of the front line SDRs and AE to deliver. But it often doesn’t land, as we’re talking to very different audiences.? So we end up with a brand and message that is diluted, or potentially mis-aligned between sales and marketing.

What’s needed is a shared narrative. A best practice here is to do a messaging workshop that brings together the CEO, the key sales and marketing leaders, and reps on the front line to craft the one narrative that scales from the “TED Talk” down to the initial discovery call.? And when sales and marketing create this together, as one team, there’s a higher level of buy-in, and ultimately, a message that is more resonant with target buyers.?

The other critical lever here is to have a single source of truth for the company narrative, from the one customer overview deck to the core sales content that’s needed at each step of the buyer’s journey. Ideally, there’s a sales content management system in place that provides detailed metrics on “what’s working” with the buyer.?

IV. THE FROZEN MIDDLE: CONSISTENT EXECUTION

Revenue growth requires consistent execution by the entire revenue team.

What we’ve all experienced is that we over-rotate on the top 20% of our reps that always hit quota, and tend to have the highest competitive win-rates. ? To get the “middle” 60% of our sellers to just hit a few incremental points of quota attainment requires that sales and marketing deeply understand the exact behaviors that we want to scale.? The best starting point is to have a shared data set of what works.

The first “un-lock” here is around having an independent 3rd party perform win/loss calls to your buyers. When done correctly, this helps reveal a more detailed view of the seller behaviors most closely aligned with Closed Won. And since these interviews are completed by an objective 3rd party, sales and marketing gain a shared understanding of the behaviors we need to scale.?

A second best practice is to invest into "deal forensics" to capture detailed trends in the buyer's journey, from discovery to price negotiation on what works. Call recording solutions are key here, as are “digital sales rooms” that offer personalized buyer experiences. Done properly, these deal forensics provide sales and marketing with shared analytics on the repeatable approaches that increase win-rates.?

V. ONE PLAN: CONSISTENT ALIGNMENT

Alignment is everything.

I often talk about “The Four Wheels of the Car” – getting? Sales, Marketing, Enablement, Customer Success all executing together, in one direction. ?What’s relatively easy is to align on a single plan for the upcoming fiscal year, and showing up together for sales kickoff. The harder, and perhaps more important work, is the in-week, in-month, and in-quarter process to align on what’s critical right now.??? (photo credit: Porsche)

Winning teams develop a process to constantly re-align in month, and in quarter, as a way to adjust to new market dynamics, and to ensure that all four wheels of the car are aligned. Perhaps this is a dedicated meeting or process.?

A lesson learned here is to get quite tactical, and to agree on the 1-2 “sales plays” that all parties are committed to execute against, and to track results from. This could be, for example, a new product launch happening this quarter.? The best sales plays are jointly authored by sales and marketing together, where there is a clear “call to action” for the front line, and sales managers and field marketing leaders constantly track and assess performance outcomes.?

CONCLUSION

OK – that’s a lot. But like most of us, I have a lot of mis-alignment battle scars at this point in the game. And I don’t claim to have it all figured out.? But I wanted to share some key lessons learned from several businesses to the > $100M ARR over the years.? Let me know your other ideas and thoughts here!?

Good selling,

JP