How To Break Down the Silos to Achieve True Alignment Between Marketing and Sales
The biggest challenge we see with clients when it comes to achieving true alignment between marketing and sales is breaking the status quo of the two teams working in silos. Typically, the sales and marketing teams each have different strategies, goals, and tools to measure success that are often not at all interconnected, making it difficult to connect their efforts. To bridge this gap, both teams need to have an ongoing cadence of connectivity that is connected to the same KPIs and goals, as well as a well-defined understanding of each other’s role in the process. We see this as the perfect in-moment opportunity for the CMO, charged with an aggressive growth agenda, and armed with the right people, tools, and processes to drive a tight alliance in partnership with the CRO to reimagine how these teams work together. CMOs are the C-suite leader with strong collaborative relationships across multiple disciplines including sales, customer success, product, people, and culture teams.
Sales must understand what marketing is doing to target potential customers more effectively, while marketers need to be aware of how sales are converting leads into customers. The CMO has the capability to lead teams to develop a strategic approach that includes building trust, understanding the customer journey, developing shared KPIs, and creating an integrated technology stack. With these steps in place, sales and marketing teams can then develop interconnected plays that work together down the full funnel to keep the sale moving forward.
Marketers are experts at crafting content pieces that attract customers and build awareness around a company's products or services. When marketing and sales work in partnership throughout the customer education process and this with customer insights from sales reps, plus behavior data from the tech stack, marketers can create even more effective campaigns that nurture leads toward becoming paying customers. This combined with a shared account list and intent-value framework, focuses the team on high-opportunity accounts, cutting time wasted on low-value/low-intent prospects less likely to close.
And CMOs have a natural alliance in the C-Suite with the CRO. With marketing’s remit directly feeding into the sales team’s goals, a tight partnership between the two leaders is critical to integration. After all, the CMO can help co-design the plays between marketing and sales, but without the buy-in and enthusiastic co-ownership from the sales leadership, the program runs the risk of falling flat. The CMO can drive this process by presenting the CRO with the overarching framework and anticipated results for the bottom line. Then, together with the CRO, outline the ways in which you see ABX fitting your teams as a cohesive unit and laying out the foundation for integration and co-ownership.
The key to this harmonious alignment isn’t just weekly status meetings or a set of content assets. To achieve true alignment, growth leaders should design tightly interconnected plays between sales and marketing built around shared goals and KPIs ... all wrapped in an environment where endless curiosity and customer-focus is fostered.
To guarantee success, regular touchpoints between the teams should include an ongoing discovery, led by marketing, to understand the prospect’s response and feedback to the campaign play, and continually uncover gaps and opportunities for optimization. Both teams must track key metrics such as conversion rates, close rates, lead quality, etc., so they can identify areas of improvement along the way. Most importantly, they must stay aligned on goals throughout the entire process—from initial contact all the way to finalizing the deal. With this new level of collaboration between marketing and sales functions within a business, not only can you expect increased engagement, and improved ROI, but also improved customer experiences.
Marketing leaders bring a comprehensive perspective to the table. We are well-versed in customer journeys, brand messaging, and how all of these facets come together to create an effective marketing and sales strategy. On top of that, we also have naturally embedded relationships across the disciplines including salespeople, customer success reps, product developers, and people & culture teams. This enables us to build bridges between teams and get everyone working towards the same goal: creating an engaging experience for customers that drives positive results. CMOs are uniquely qualified for this purpose and can ensure successful collaboration across all departments as well as improved performance in today’s competitive markets.
Strategies to make your marketing and sales teams work together
Creating successful alignment between marketing and sales teams requires a well-crafted strategy that considers the needs of both teams. Here are some steps to take to make your marketing and sales teams work together more effectively for the successful implementation of an ABX strategy:
1. Identify ABX Strategy, Goals, and Objectives: To succeed both teams need to have a unified vision of what success looks like - together. Host a goal-setting workshop where marketing leaders can support both teams in defining the goals for each team and making sure they are aligned with each other so you can clarify roles, identify funnel collaboration points, and measure progress accurately. Once these fundamentals are set, you can establish ongoing collaboration around every stage of the funnel and buyer journey to develop an ABX strategy, ICP, target accounts list (TAL), etc. This foundation will serve to inform outreach plans, campaign/channel strategies, content personalization plans, and pilot plans, as well as define how success will be measured.
2. Foster an Environment of Curious Communication: To create effective alignment, open curiosity, and communication are key. Set a regular cadence and agenda for touchpoints between both teams where there is regular dialog around customer conversations, program performance, feedback, progress, and challenges. Growth marketers should use these learnings to identify gaps in content and messaging and optimize future plays.
3. Define Roles and Responsibilities: When structuring a truly organization-wide ABX plan, the R&Rs and org charts between marketing and sales should be overlapped and re-evaluated to define who is responsible for which tasks, and how each role interacts with one another across the teams. This will help streamline efforts, reduce duplication of work, and make sure everyone’s time is used efficiently.
4. Design a System to Track Progress & Measure Success: Create unified dashboards for both marketing and sales with key metrics across all channels that provide access to accurate information about customer engagement and behavior. This will enable team members to track progress against goals easily while providing insights into areas that need improvement or further investment to reach maximum ROI potential.
5. Train Growth Leaders: Growth marketers need to rethink their roles in the ABX framework. After the CMO, growth marketers play the biggest role in moving the integrated plays forward and continually optimizing for better results. Leaders can help these players understand how to best use ABM strategies to create meaningful connections with customers while keeping resource allocation efficient at the same time. They should also be able to identify opportunities where marketing can support sales efforts more effectively and vice versa to increase ROI potential from campaigns run jointly by both departments. Successful growth marketers will also need to navigate co-ownership with SDR and other sales leaders by taking responsibility for their understanding of the program and how to champion their role in it. Growth marketers can do this by owning the internal sales training programs, driving regular investigative and measurement sessions, and owning the metrics, insights, and recommendations for improved efficiencies.
6. Develop Interwoven Plays: Both teams should work together on developing creative campaigns that leverage their individual strengths, such as designing content pieces that attract customers from the marketing side, while using customer insights from BDRs for better qualification before handing them over for further nurturing by marketers and sales reps. Marketing and sales leaders should work together to define what is the action taken by each role in each step of the process, ensuring integration between digital and human interactions, and what is the learning or outcome they are driving to trigger the next step in the process. While marketing’s goal is to continue to educate and influence, while learning the customer information gaps to improve the process, sales can be armed with “course-smoothing” and “course-changing” interventions for key moments across the journey through intentional discovery and feedback to marketing to develop the assets to arm sales for intervention.
7. Start With a Pilot Campaign: Transforming to true sales and marketing integration is often a massive undertaking that takes time, expertise, and change management support. We usually recommend breaking your transition into phases and beginning with a pilot campaign running in 8-10 week sprints - this allows you to get feedback quickly so you can refine your approach or pivot if needed before investing too much time or resources into something that doesn’t deliver results as expected. Then, phase out your program maturity in manageable chunks as you move your team from coordination to integration. Use your recurring sales and marketing checkpoints to analyze performance, optimize, and measure again.
Get a free assessment to see how you can improve your alignment
Unlocking the potential of your organization is as easy as taking a free assessment to evaluate how you can better align your marketing and sales teams. This assessment will provide an objective view of the current state of processes, technology stack, customer journey, and more. With feedback from experienced professionals - knowledgeable on the challenges faced when achieving alignment - you will have access to invaluable insights that can be used to make decisions about what works best for your organization.
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