The Secret Way for Sales to Get Marketing Aligned
If you’re a sales leader who missed their quarterly target while your marketing team hit theirs, it’s time for a heart-to-heart. The relationship needs to be reevaluated. There’s an easy way to start, of course: change marketing’s goal.
When marketing’s key performance indicator is built around revenue (or, at least sales qualified opportunities), it will prioritize activities that generate revenue. Even long term investments, like those that are brand-centered, will be approached with the mindset of how they can support growth.
The Smart Way to Reinforce the Relationship
Working with a forward thinking marketing leader and the rest of your executive team can help get the marketing goals aligned with sales.
But there’s another way that sales leaders can get marketing on the same side of the table. It’s more work, it’s more tactical. But it’s just as important as aligning goals. It’s about providing value back to the marketing team.
Too often the marketing and sales relationship is purely transactional. Leads flow from marketing to sales. Collateral is built by marketing for sales. Campaigns are often requested by sales and executed by marketing.
Instead of seeing the relationship in this way, think of how you can push value back to marketing. And by pushing value, you can get on the same page in so many more fundamental ways. Let’s take a look.
Give Insights into your ICP
Your marketing team is likely building a list of target accounts that match their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). These are accounts that they’re focusing their Account Based Marketing efforts on, like, say, display ads. But building these lists isn’t easy. Marketing needs to understand how to effectively filter down millions of accounts to just those that they want to spend money on attracting.
Sales can help by summarizing and sharing insights that they get from the discovery calls and sales conversations they have each day. By sharing insights on which industry, geography, and other company attributes describe the best-matched customer, they can help marketers tune who they go after. Much of this information sales leaders can distill in an automated way from their own emails, CRM, and call recordings.
(And your Ideal Persona)
The same is true at the contact level. If marketing is targeting executive leadership at your target accounts, but your champion is really at the director level, then they’re wasting resources. Share with marketing quantifiable data and compelling anecdotes about the kinds of roles and less visible attributes of your champion. They’ll be better able to focus resources on the people that are interested to move the ball with you.
Get the Right Target Information
Marketing might have access to the latest prospect data tools. Huge, constantly updated databases of prospects’ emails, phone numbers, job titles, and more. As sophisticated as these tools are, they can’t be perfectly current. But sales people, via their interactions with prospects, get updates to this data all the time. A bounced email, a wrong number, an unannounced job change, and other data is valuable for marketers to better manage their campaigns.
The more that sales teams can connect their tools, data, and communications back into systems of record, the more that the data can be evergreen. That means less wasted effort, less risk of email reputation damage, and just better performing campaigns.
Better Messaging Resonance
Is marketing’s narrative actually effective? How often has your sales development or account executive team received email templates from marketing and promptly ignored them because they were too robotic or ineffective?
Sure, marketing can test messaging via A/B tests on ads, website copy, and bulk email. But seeing which messages resonate (and with whom) in a sales situation, marketing can adjust how it communicates value. Look for what sales activities “win” so you can replicate them at scale.
A similar issue is the degree to which you can develop urgency. Deals get hung up due to lack of budget or general CYA issues. But if you can share what is generating urgency with your prospects, marketing can inculcate prospects with messages that generate urgency early in the funnel. That means faster moving deals.
Beyond messaging is how you position relative to partners, customers, and competitors. No one speaks to as many people as your sales and SDR teams. So, learn from them how other players position and what resonates so marketing can tune how you position your own offers.
Start a Marketing Enablement Program
Why is sales the only one to get ‘enabled’? The idea that marketing is sitting on-high with all the answers is ridiculous. Bring in top sellers to do “marketing enablement” to train up your team on the pains and needs that prospects and sales have so you can better support them. From content and lead quality to messaging and competitors.
Similarly, if you have a PLG or a pilot-led sales motion then there will be a wealth of data generated during the sales process. Information like which functionality do people use, which nurture messages bring people over the line to purchase, and more.
Support Marketing Programs
It can be frustrating to run marketing campaigns and not have sales support. I’m lucky to work with an incredibly supportive sales executive and organization. When we have prospect dinners or tradeshows, sales is first in line to support. They know that we have the same goals in mind, so they’re happy to volunteer to staff the booth or schmooze at an ABM event.
Alignment is Easy, It’s About the Two-Way Street
To stop having a contentious relationship, sales and marketing should have reinforcing (or similar, or the same!) goals. But they should also focus on how they can push value back to each other. And do so in a way that the whole team sees and wants to replicate.
Set up a weekly meeting and a Slack / Teams channel with your sales peers and be open to their feedback. The result is going to be better collaboration, alignment, and goal hitting.
