Sales and marketing alignment isn’t a new business buzz term or fad. It’s a long-term strategy that leads to higher revenues, when done right. But it’s also one of the more challenging aspects of managing B2B revenue growth.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many companies buckling under the pressures brought on by misaligned teams. So, in this post, we’re going to look at the foundations for aligning these two teams.
You’ll also get suggestions for additional resources to start your B2B alignment transformation and what the next steps should be. Sales and marketing alignment builds a strong revenue engine for B2B companies, and yours shouldn’t fail because of a misalignment issue that can be solved.
The reports from Sirius Decisions show that B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieve 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth.
Even if you are a company that is practicing Account Based Marketing (ABM) already, the survey conducted by Quarry shows that the no.1 challenge is getting your sales and marketing teams aligned.
Growth dictates strategic alignment
When you manage a small company, you have more control over all aspects of the day-to-day operations. It’s easy for people to talk to each other, quickly bounce ideas off one another. With a smaller team, it’s also easier for managers to have regular one-on-one meetings and share information with team members.
But, as you grow in size and revenue, this is not as feasible. As your company scales, the alignment factor becomes more critical even as it gets more difficult.
Thus, you’ll need a selling process that aligns the resources of both teams that makes it easier to engage target customers and close deals. Because while it’s all about the buyer, it starts with “us” – the internal team that executes the process. And your buyer won’t care about your lack of an aligned internal process between your sales and marketing teams. They want to see a unified position that gets them through the buyer’s journey seamlessly.
Customers drive processes
B2B buyer expectations have evolved significantly. And the old norms and behaviors – including separate silos for marketing and sales – need to be thrown out the window.
This has been the driving force behind the need to integrate sales and marketing processes. And changing that process starts with your team having a deep understanding of the full buyer experience. Then you can build a high revenue-generating sales and marketing process that aligns with that experience.
For a second think about how much we have complicated the buying process – discovery calls, demos, PoC discussions, etc. And we never think of changing anything until we step back and think like the buyer, or think “how do they feel about it?”
CSO Insights reports show that companies with dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes had an average of 10% more of their sales people on quota.
What exactly needs to improve will differ from company to company. For instance, your company may realize that it needs to improve its discovery. Or, potentially, your sales content may not be resonating. Sometimes, it may be both.
The only way to know where to make those changes is to dive deeper and understand the buying process as it is right now.
You need to know who our real customers are, what do they care about and why, and, then, how to reach out to more such people.
Fundamentally, we need to stop thinking about volume, and take a more targeted approach.
Sales & marketing alignment – a three pillar framework
Once you understand the buyer’s journey, it’s time to build an aligned team. Everything starts with the 3 Pillars of Alignment Transformation framework. These pillars will guide you in establishing a foundation of better alignment between your sales and marketing teams.
1. Data
Marketing and sales teams in most organizations tend to have separate processes, tools, and sources of data. And it is no surprise that their priorities are different. While, at the outset, it may sometimes allow the teams to be individually successful, it doesn’t foster the collaboration required to deliver an unified experience for the customer.
And if we continue to look at data in silos, we will continue to leak revenue opportunities until it hits us hard one fine day.
Alignment starts with data. And before we invest in getting access to new sales or marketing data, we must analyze and make an effort to leverage the immense amount of data we already have.
Our ability to win business with the modern buyer tends to have great dependency on what we know about the customer before we start our communication.
Lastly, there needs to be a single source of data accessible to both sales and marketing. Using the same data and dashboards for both sales and marketing, can make it easier to measure the impact as well as the performance throughout the year.
So, your first step in creating an aligned revenue generation process is building a single source of truth from customer interactions. Keep in mind that the data must be up to date and easy to access.
2. Process
Following an understanding of your buyer’s journey, develop a process that seamlessly aligns sales and marketing efforts.
The problem with misaligned sales and marketing teams is that a lot of resources go waste. One of the best examples is content. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute reports that 60 to 70% of B2B content goes unused in the sales process. Hubspot shares that 79% of marketing leads never convert due to efficient nurturing or lack of follow up.
If both teams are on the same page and aligned on the process, things would be much more efficient.That said, it needs to be an end-to-end revenue generation process. And all players should understand their role and that of the other teams involved in this process.
3. Communication
Sales and marketing teams need to communicate with each other – formally. The processes you develop should address having a formal feedback loop to help both these teams learn from each other and iterate.
Regular feedback on marketing campaigns is a must to stay agile, so that we can adjust when we see that things are quite not hitting the milestones expected.
It’s not just about including sales teams in the early stages of creating marketing campaigns, but they should also be kept abreast of the progress being made on the shared goals and objectives.
This helps keep both sales and marketing accountable for their contributions to building pipeline and closing new business.
Finally, the performance metrics of aligned organizations…
While talking about aligning sales and marketing, it all ultimately boils down to the impact of alignment on the overall business performance, and more importantly revenue outcome. Recently, I had an opportunity to read a study titled “The Upside of Sales & Marketing Alignment”, conducted by Northern Illinois University in conjunction with Miller Heiman (Journal of Selling – Volume 15, Number 1).
The study shows that they were able to uncover 6 performance metrics that can be directly measured as the result of better alignment between sales and marketing. They are:
- Growth in number of qualified leads
- Increase in lead conversation rates
- Growth in new account acquisition
- Growth in customer retention rates
- Growth in average account billing size (Increase in order size)
- Revenue growth
The study also demonstrated that marketing needs to go beyond demand generation and should also strive to:
- Enhance the quality of customer relationships
- Increase contact density
- Build contact authority inside the customer’s organization
In fact, Yaag discusses the revenue marketing maturity stages from traditional to demand generation to revenue marketing, in The Revenue Marketing Book.
Additional resources to develop increased alignment
As I’ve had the pleasure of engaging with different learning resources, I’d like to share a few of them so you can begin your alignment transformation journey.
Understanding alignment transformation
Bridging the gap between sales and marketing is the ultimate goal of creating alignment. One of the key issues leaders will have to address is the use and effectiveness of marketing content. Content Marketing Institute in this post dissects a study on Content Marketing & Sales Alignment.
I also discuss leadership’s role in alignment transformation as well as my 3-pillar framework on episode 86 of the Predictable Revenue Podcast.
Also to learn about the cost of not transforming your marketing and sales, you can listen to episode 24 on The ABM Conversations Podcast
Gaining support for alignment
Change always comes with pushback, and you need to know how to start the process with buy-in from all players from day one.
In their book, Aligned to Achieve, Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin discuss the process of starting the alignment conversation and engaging senior leaders to gain support.
Episode 36 of TheAlignmentPodcast.com discusses how to address the dysfunctional sales and marketing narrative with Ron Carucci.
You can also listen to episode 15 with Maggie Sarfo. In addition to learning the one question all CEOs should be asking heads of sales and marketing, you’ll get further insights into tying marketing and sales alignment to your corporate strategy to secure stakeholder buy-in.
Understanding the current B2B buyer
To design a high-converting buyer’s journey, you first need to understand your buyer personas. Go beyond the superficial to what really drives B2B buyers by understanding the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) from DiscoverOrg.
Also, check out Episode 30 of TheAlignmentPodcast.com. It features an insightful discussion with Antwoine Flowers, Ph.D., on how to use data to get the information that buyers won’t tell you. This is a critical step in ensuring you have the right data strategy we discussed in pillar one of our alignment framework.
Next steps
Apart from resources like the ones highlighted above, a lot of my experience in alignment comes from working directly with B2B companies. I’ve seen first-hand the different alignment strategies developed to meet the unique needs of B2B companies, even if they operate in the same space, such as SaaS.
So, if you’re ready to tackle aligning your sales and marketing teams once and for all, I encourage you to grab a copy of my new book “Create Togetherness” where I layout a strategic roadmap for B2B leaders ready to take on the challenge of aligning their sales and marketing teams to win the business of modern buyers. You can also book a complimentary alignment strategy meeting to explore how we might be able to work together toward your goal of building an signed Revenue Engine that’s optimize your revenue growth.
