Are we on the same team?

Easy to identify and difficult to solve…align Marketing & Sales to accelerate growth

Conduit Partners has over 60 years of collective professional experience across multiple functional disciplines: Marketing, Sales, Operations and Finance.  While these are often seen as independent functions, the most successful  performing organizations we work with have a singular common practice: they invest efforts to synthesize these teams, align organizational goals, and reward shared successes.  One of the most frequent challenges our clients face relates to aligning the two functions that are most directly tied to customers: Marketing and Sales.  

Research from LinkedIn suggests 87% of sales and marketing leaders believe that alignment between their teams is essential to drive growth. Surprisingly, an even higher majority say this is nearly impossible to accomplish.  While there are multiple causes for this, the three most three common factors we see are:

Divergent Performance Metrics  - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are intended to help teams know if they are on track to accomplish their objectives.  Marketing teams typically measure impressions, brand awareness, lead generation and conversion.  Sales teams often measure activities (e.g. leads converted, meetings held, opportunities created, etc.) and closed deals/revenue generated.  The challenge organizations often face isn’t that the KPIs are wrong, the problem is that KPIs aren’t constructed with an understanding of how they are interrelated.

Different Customer Journeys - In many organizations, sales and marketing teams operate in different silos, with different customer journeys. Throughout each of the two journeys, different data is collected on customers. This results in a fragmented customer journey that confuses and frustrates the potential customer as well as both the marketing and sales departments.

Inconsistent Processes for Lead Handoff - The biggest point of contention between marketing and sales often stems from the marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) process.  Marketing teams get frustrated that leads aren’t converted, and sales teams are often frustrated at the quality of leads.  

So how can companies address these challenges?  Here are three suggestions to drive better alignment between Marketing and Sales:

Establish executive buy-in and prioritize company-wide adoption

It starts at the top: Senior Leadership needs to demonstrate that they are prioritizing Sales and Marketing alignment.  Demonstrate the cost and consequence of misalignment (e.g. lead-to-opportunity, opportunity-to-conversion, renewal/churn rates, etc.) and set clear goals for improvement.  

Identify Key Performance Indicators and Expectations for Marketing & Sales

Marketing and Sales should co-develop a plan that works backwards and “up the funnel” from revenue to lead. This will help identify what is required at each node - awareness, lead, prospect, opportunity, win - to meet expected business outcomes.  Gartner has reported that only roughly half of sales and marketing teams report having a shared definition of what constitutes a lead. Aligning on firmographic (e.g. company size, vertical, location, etc.) and demographic (e.g. title, role) targeting will help both teams understand what a good lead looks like, and will help to start to define a lead scoring model.  Make sure that all KPIs are directly correlated to stated business goals, and that your systems are tuned to measure/track the metric.

Implement a cadence of regular performance reviews

After you have agreed on the metrics you will measure, it is important to share how each team is performing.  A regular cadence (e.g. a Weekly Business Review) allows you to report out key wins and opportunities for improvement, and serves to increase transparency and reduce reaction time to course correct. In addition to formal meetings, publish dashboards/reports to all staff - transparency breeds open communication and ideas.    

These three areas represent the first steps in driving alignment between Marketing and Sales.  They will break down silos that often exist and help address the three primary factors that cause the misalignment (Unaligned Performance Metrics, Different Customer Journeys and Inconsistent Process for Lead Handoff).

Conduit Partners has developed tools to help companies drive organizational alignment. If you’re interested in learning more, click here.