5 STEPS TO ALIGNING MARKETING AND SALES

Misalignment between sales and marketing in an age-old problem for B2B marketers. It often stems from the leads that marketing passes to sales. In its worst case, sales assume every lead they get from marketing has no value. It becomes a vicious cycle; marketing sends leads to sales; sales reject the leads or doesn’t pursue them at all. The more leads marketing sends to sales, the more the sales team thinks the marketing leads are bad. What follows are some steps to take to get marketing aligned and improve everyone’s outcomes.

1) Sales Doesn’t Care About Your Problems: Sales only cares about selling and the sooner you recognize this the sooner you will get alignment. Telling sales leaders that you don’t have a budget for something or don’t have time, will get you nowhere. You need to understand the outcomes you want to drive as a marketing team and align them with the company’s sales and business objectives. You also need to get your entire team aligned around this approach so that there is a single and consistent message from marketing to sales. Keep in mind, they are your customer.

2) Align Marketing Goals to Sales Goals:  You need to understand what sales are striving for to be able to align your approach. This is far more complex than just understanding what the sales target is. To build out an effective marketing and demand generation strategy, you need to know what makes sales tick and how to influence them by knowing:

• How are salespeople compensated, and do certain sales generate more or quicker revenue?
• How are the sales leaders compensated, and how can you support their goals?
• Which salespeople are most receptive to working with marketing, and how can you support them to improve everyone's results?

3) Have a Dialog and be Transparent: You need to establish a dialog with sales. These conversations should focus on how marketing and sales can work together collaboratively. You need to be transparent about the metrics you use and how they align with business outcomes. They need to happen across all levels of sales, from leadership all the way through account executives. A basic framework for topics and audiences are:

• Sales Leadership: Talk with the sales leaders about the opportunities generated by marketing campaigns and tactics.  Show them the metrics you measure and why they are important to marketing. Be completely transparent about what is working, what is not, and why. 
• Division/Region Sales Leaders: Talk about the campaigns that are driving opportunities for their teams. Use the meetings to talk about any bottlenecks in the lead process and look for solutions. Agree on campaigns to expand, and those to cut. A key to success at this level is to improve performance at every step in the lead process. 
• Account Executives: Creating a dialog with the people receiving marketing leads is key. They are on the front line, pursuing the leads marketing is creating and can be an early indicator of campaigns that are working, and ones that are not. Having an open dialog with this team gives you the insight to adjust your campaigns in real-time to drive more impact.

Having these conversations is a team effort. A marketing person should be assigned at each level, with a mechanism in place to communicate findings back to the market team at large.

4) Give Sales a Seat at the Table: When designing marketing programs and campaigns, give sales a seat at the table. Set up a marketing advisory council made up of key sales leaders and account executives. Getting the sales team more engaged will deliver many benefits, including:

• Sales will understand the level of effort it takes to develop programs and campaigns.
• Sales can provide real-world guidance about what works for them and what does not. They will bring new perspectives that can enhance existing campaigns or present ideas that were not considered.
• Most importantly, sales will buy into what marketing is doing. They will become your advocates.

5) Build Processes to Ensure Success: Make sure that the flow of leads to sales follow a clear process, that sales and marketing have agreed on. There should be service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) in place as well that are also signed off on. Some examples to consider are:

• Agree on what a Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) are.
• Establish an SLA for how long sales has to qualify and disposition an MQL.
• Agree on how MQLs that are disqualified will be handled.
• Agree on how records will be kept and what system represents the single record of the truth.

Following these steps will help you get more aligned with sales. Over time it will reduce friction and increase collaboration. It will also help enhance the business impact that marketing and sales have on the business.

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