What’s Measured Improves

My Partner and I recently took our 3-year old-niece to Disneyland, by the end of the day we were beat. It was a fantastic day, lit up by the joyful smile and inquisitive mind of our niece but at times it felt like it really could have gone either way. The reason being that my partner and I entered the experience with slightly differing ideas of what a successful day might look like and drastically different ways of measuring said success.

My main measure of success was how many times our niece would smile, giggle and transport herself and us into her imagination, and my Partners’ was ensuring she didn’t hurt herself, had enough suncream on and wasn’t eating too much sugar; unintentionally creating a classic good cop, bad cop scenario. Of course, there was a huge amount of crossover in our objectives, we both wanted to provide our niece with the best time possible while ensuring she remained safe and healthy however, our metrics and the way we were remunerated were vastly different.

Fortunately, we spotted it early re-aligned our expectations/metrics, and rather than being at whits end throughout the day we managed to create a fantastic and rewarding memory.

Something similar happens all too often within the business world, particularly between revenue-facing teams. If we take the age-old confrontation between Sales & Marketing.

Measure what matters

Every company wants to be able to measure its success. Often, performance tracking is done at a team or department level — and there might be discrepancies in how metrics are defined, leading to messy reporting and misalignment.

One of the leading causes of misaligned marketing and sales teams is separate goals and success metrics. Think about it: if a marketing team is told to generate a certain type of lead without any input from sales, how do they know if they’re even?targeting the right buyer?

It’s vital that you establish a shared set of goals and universal definitions. Naturally, the metrics most relevant to you will depend, to some extent, on the individual characteristics of your organisation—from whether you’re engaged in transaction or solution selling, to whether you measure you sale cycle in weeks, months, or years. However, as the first step towards cross-departmental alignment, we must centre around core metrics:?

• Core metrics must have value. Your metrics need to be relevant to the main objectives of your business, and be good measures of success.
• Core metrics must be actionable. Avoid vanity metrics and focus on the data points that can truly guide your decisions and strategy.
• Core metrics must be unambiguous. There should be no room for misinterpretation, and every user must agree on the same definitions.

To get the most from these metrics, everyone needs to be able to see the key data, and ideally, to see it displayed in the same ways. If your organisation has a dashboard-based system, great—build yourself a?dashboard centred entirely around Sales and Marketing’s shared KPIs.

Making the metrics matter?

Then comes the strategising, as to how you will fill these dashboards and achieve the metrics that will increase the likelihood of reaching your common goals.?

Develop a shared plan that maps leads to prospects and prospects to revenue. Identify “fit factors” to help score leads. Firmographic information like company size, industry, location, and tech stack, as well as demographic information like a contact’s title or their budgetary control, can determine whether a lead is a good or bad fit. It’s also important to agree on a?lead scoring model and clearly define where the handover point sits.

According to a Gartner study,?only about half of sales and marketing teams report having a shared definition of what constitutes a lead.

Work to reach agreement on the definition of a?marketing-qualified lead (MQL), a sales-qualified lead (SQL), and where?account-based marketing?(ABM) fits in — and get specific. Break down the difference between “warm” and “hot” leads, and how you prioritise which accounts to pursue. The?more detailed your definitions, the less room there is for misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

A great tool/data point in helping to enrich this approach is using Intent data. Intent data?is a source of truth-telling for salespeople and marketers around whom they should prioritise in their outreach. It shows who is in-market to purchase a solution like yours right now and where they are in their?buying cycle. Based on whom sales and marketing have agreed is a good fit, marketing can immediately jump on high-value prospects and tune the targeting of collateral to topics that matter most to the prospects, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

So as prospects hit the triggers and increase their intent score they are then pushed into different categories which show their likelihood to convert.

Sales can then evaluate the prospect’s level of interest and salespeople can place them as a contact within a priority list based on that intent level and what actions they have taken. By prioritising the prospect based on their intent score, salespeople can focus on the potential customers who are more likely to convert based on where they are in the buyer journey. This refinement of your pipeline will improve how your sales teams use resources and optimise their workflows to become more efficient and productive.

Sales and marketing alignment is an agreement between both teams to share goals, priorities, and even?key performance indicators?(KPIs). The goals: deliver a seamless experience for the prospect or customer, increase conversion rates, and ultimately boost revenue. It’s a symbiotic relationship in which both teams mutually benefit by supporting one another and using shared metrics and enriching data points with intent is a great first step!

Stop spinning your wheels?

If your sales and marketing teams are not aligned, it’s going to be much more difficult to hit your number. You’ll spin your wheels and get frustrated, leading to turnover, lost productivity, and reduced budget because you can’t get a return on investment.

Ideally, Sales and marketing alignment means you’re two sides of the same coin, you each have unique perspectives while maintaining a healthy amount of tension to challenge each other and keep improving one another’s functions.

When everyone at your company is on the same page about your core metrics definitions, it creates a consistent understanding of how to measure success. An aligned workforce makes everything from collaboration to decision-making and strategising easier, and more impactful. So don’t wait to set clear definitions of each of your core business metrics and move the firm from a function-centered reporting structure to a market-centered one.

While this isn’t a silver bullet, it will help to close the distance between teams and provide, at minimum, a foundation to bridge the gap between departments and bring these twin planets into harmonious, productive alignment.