Sales and marketing alignment: In a hybrid world, it’s no longer a choice

As someone who found first love in marketing and true love in sales, let me come right out and say it: Sales and marketing alignment needs to happen and it needs to happen now. The events of 2020 have accelerated change far beyond anyone’s imagination. If we accept that the “new normal” is here to stay, then it’s time we stopped behaving as if the “old normal” is coming back.?

We used to get away with treating sales and marketing alignment as a theoretical nice-to-have because, in all fairness, aligning two disparate sets of expectations?— and achieving it in reality— can be challenging. Unfortunately, the new normal is less forgiving.

There are two emergent forces at work: the scale of digital transformation and the rise of hybrid working arrangements. These are changing how we operate and, more significantly, how our B2B customers buy:?

• An October 2020 McKinsey study revealed that 70-80% of B2B decision-makers have come to prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service over in-person sales.?
• LinkedIn’s own research into the State of Sales APAC 2021 uncovered that, for two in three buyers, working remotely has made the purchasing process easier.?
• Within the LinkedIn sales organisation, we are also cognisant of the fact that 61% of tech buyers connect with a seller only after they’ve determined relevance or conducted independent research (The Age of Agility: APAC Edition, LinkedIn).?

This tells us that, for sales to scale, we need more marketing air cover; for marketing to deliver on that, they need more visibility into our sales strategy. Now, more than ever, sales and marketing must be aligned — and the ultimate plane of alignment is the customer.?

Learning to place the buyer first??

We often hit a wall with sales and marketing alignment because it’s hard to see past our inherent differences. But there is a common ground; a very important one in fact — the customer. I believe sales and marketing alignment can happen more naturally when both teams start organising , or rather re-organising, aligning themselves around the customer journey.?

Trust is the real deal-maker here. If you’ve already adopted a Buyer First mindset to selling, you could be a lot closer than you think. Positioning yourself as a trusted advisor is important but so is brand trust. With 89% of decision makers telling us that thought leadership is effective in enhancing their perceptions of an organisation, sales needs to bring marketing into the fold. By working in tandem and synchronising your messages at every touchpoint along the customer journey, your company, as a brand, can more effectively deliver the seamless and personalised customer experience that buyers today so desperately want.?

Drawing from my own experience and recent conversations I’ve had with business leaders around the region, I believe there are two fundamental areas to address in order to achieve true sales and marketing alignment.?

At the heart of the matter: People and culture?

Achieving alignment involves a change in mindset that is best role-modelled by leaders. Leaders play such an essential role in setting the tone, helping their teams understand the interdependency of sales and marketing, and inspiring them to collectively embrace alignment between the two functions. This approach is key, and the mindset shift, critical.?

I recently hosted a live webinar where Adobe’s Duncan Egan and Microsoft’s Stacy Seah weighed in on the topic. Duncan talked about how Adobe ensures that both teams have shared goals and equal clarity over the business vision and how it is evolving in real-time. That level of transparency, to me, fosters trust and lowers a major barrier to alignment. Stacy added on by suggesting that teams could be motivated to stay close to each other if they better showcased the value they bring to the table — a ‘what’s in it for me’ approach can be very incentivising.?

There are many paths to alignment success but all are paved by an organisational commitment to change. This is even more important now that hybrid work has reduced or removed the opportunity for informal hallway conversations between sales and marketing.?

We can no longer count on alignment happening by chance; it must be by design.?

Hardwiring alignment: Systems and processes?

Technology can be a powerful enabler. After all, data is unbiased; it doesn’t lie. But when the two teams are working with different datasets, they can’t help but form their own limited picture of the customer. By tearing down the wall between siloed sales tech and martech stacks and ensuring that both teams are looking at the same data, we can facilitate greater alignment.?

At LinkedIn, we’re already seeing this trend in motion. Our internal data reveals a 26% year-on-year growth in the number of marketers holding LinkedIn Sales Navigator licences (Savvy Marketers Use Sales Technology, LinkedIn). This is a very encouraging sign because marketing is critical to sales strategy execution. When both teams use the same technology, such as Sales Navigator, it becomes that much easier to assign responsibilities and hold each other accountable for delivering on the agreed outcomes.?

It’s true that technology can do a lot of the heavy lifting but, at the end of the day, it’s no silver bullet. In a recent webinar on virtual selling that LinkedIn Sales Solutions hosted, ICICI Bank’s Anupam Verma made a strong case. He said that in digital transformation, it’s not legacy systems that are holding companies back; it’s a legacy mindset. The same goes for sales and marketing alignment. Structures, systems and processes are a scaffolding. If we want to build long-term, sustainable business success in today’s buyer-first world, we need to commit ourselves to doing things differently. We simply cannot look forward to the past.