Gap 1 – Part 2: Closing the gap between marketing and sales

When examining the first B2B marketing value chain gap, we focused on segmentation and understanding how to best plan out your approach to market.? Many executives believe that building out a segmentation strategy is enough to inform a go-to-market plan – but care needs to be taken to extend the strategy to build out effective targeting and go-to-market motions that are tightly aligned with your sales teams to drive the desired impact.

Understand what mix of sales professionals you will be supporting

Before building a marketing plan to drive leads for the sales team – the first step is to understand how the sales organization is structured and how they are compensated for their efforts.? While there are many different models of sales team structure, it is not uncommon in high-tech marketing to be paired with a hybrid sales team that encompasses 4 different types of representatives that align with the following roles:

Key account or named account managers – these representatives are focused on larger accounts and are usually dedicated to finding new business or growing existing business inside of those accounts.? Some businesses have a higher rank of representatives that manage global accounts as well.? This is important to understand, as a major bank that may seem like a great target in your local market may be marketed to and sold to by a global marketing team elsewhere in your organization.

Territory or regional account managers – Focus on a specific geographical area and may sell directly, through partners, or a combination of both.? For example, a territory representative may have a list of existing accounts they service directly but work the remainder of their territory selling through partners.

As their name suggests, inside sales representatives generally work through telesales, email and social selling.? They may be paired with external representatives – either named or territory account managers – handling inbound requests and sales operations tasks.? They may also carry outbound telesales targets to drive revenue inside their assigned base.

Business development representatives – sometimes referred to as sales development representatives or marketing development representatives, these salespeople work with inbound leads from marketing to further qualify them and accept them into the sales pipeline for other salespeople to work on.? These teams often report to the marketing organization, which can help direct their efforts efficiently to ensure that Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are quickly followed up on, that qualified leads are quickly served to the sales team, and that unqualified leads are routed to the marketing database for further nurturing.

How are your sales teams aligned with the market?

Now that you understand the types of sales teams you need to support, the next step is understanding how they align with the market. Could you start with your named account representations and understand which named accounts they are aligned to?

For your territory managers, understand whether they have named accounts, their most important partners, and the install base in their territory.? Sometimes, you will end up with a split of sales representatives who are “hunters” – focused solely on net new customer acquisition and a list of “farmer” reps focused on serving and growing the existing customer base.? It is essential to break down the focus by rep to understand how to plan activities to align with their goals.

For inside sales reps – understand which tiers of accounts they are focused on and what a good lead looks like for them.

How are your sales teams compensated?

Now that you’ve identified what kinds of salespeople you have and how they align with the market, it is important to understand how they are compensated, as compensation will drive behaviour and, ultimately, the adoption (or not) of your marketing campaigns.? What products is each rep allowed to sell, and where do they get bonuses or multipliers?? This indicates that the company is focused on selling these products as part of its growth strategy.

Some organizations only focus on margin/profit, allowing the sales team to manage the margin on each deal.? If this is the case, it will likely influence your marketing toward finding more complex/profitable deals and focusing on upselling profitable add-ons for existing clients.

Other organizations may focus on revenue – which will cause you to either focus on ample opportunities (which take a longer time to close but offer a bigger payoff) or on many small deals (which are worth less each but turnover and convert to revenue faster).? Which you choose to go after will largely depend on the capabilities of your product and whether it is easy to implement.? Products that are difficult to get up and running require more upfront investment – but typically offer good long-term ROI – so plan your mix accordingly.

Many B2B marketers employ a strategy to blend these two objectives – focusing on fast turnover, lower revenue products for inside sales representatives and territory account representatives, and going after higher margin, complex opportunities for their named and key accounts.?

Know how well your sales teams are currently doing

Are your sales teams currently at or above their quotas, or are they challenged to meet their goals today?? How does their performance align with the types of opportunities that you’ve been able to bring them so far?? Auditing the types of deals your marketing has created in the past and how it aligns with the needs of each sales team - is a good practice for determining whether different targeting, go-to-market motions, and sales motions might be needed to help them close any gaps.

Survey your sales team

Alignment between sales and marketing teams is a challenge.? Gartner recently reported that 62% of organizations define qualified leads differently in sales and marketing functions.? How aligned are you with your sales team on defining a lead??

Gartner also found that organizations with sales and marketing teams well-aligned on cross-functional metrics were three times more likely to succeed.

When was the last time (if ever) you surveyed your sales team to see how aligned they are with your marketing plan and output?? What is your sales team's current satisfaction level with marketing leads??

Next up – building your target lists

Now that you know how the team is organized, which accounts they are focused on, how they are compensated and what types of deals they need – it is time to build your target lists.? Next time, we’ll look at strategies for building target lists to drive campaign responses that build valuable leads for your sales teams that align with their account assignments and goals.