If you are in a marketing role or are a sales leader within your organization, it is very probable that the marketing/sales alignment conversation has come up at some point. It’s the basis of so many important and emergent marketing and sales trends – the move from lead gen to demand gen, the shift to Rev Ops from siloed ops, selling to a committee vs. an individual with account-based marketing (ABM), and making a move towards asynchronous selling.
There are just as many obstacles facing teams as they try to get on the same page. Read on to break down the top five challenges facing marketing and sales teams as they try to align, as well as a few solutions for making team alignment a reality.
Marketing-to-Sales Handoff
The marketing-to-sales handoff seems simple enough: when a lead becomes qualified for sales (a sales-qualified lead, or an SQL), it’s the job of the marketing team to ensure that their sales colleagues know about it.
What could go wrong? The answer is…a lot.
To generalize, there are two areas where this handoff can go awry.
The first is the qualifying criteria or the agreement around when the right time is to hand the lead off to sales. Think about it: what are your marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and SQL criteria? What are you using to ensure that these criteria are met for handoffs day-to-day? How nuanced are the qualifications?
If your sales and marketing team may have different answers to these questions, the result can be handoff nightmares.
The second problem area involves the mechanism for your handoffs. Are your marketing leads rotated automatically once qualified, or do they already have an owner before they ever get to that stage? Do you assign your sales rep a task, push notification, send them an email, notify them in Slack, or some combination of these options?
Tools like Marketing Hub and Sales Hub are great at facilitating this process, but the process only works insofar as it has been defined. The marketing-to-sales handoff must be thought through and agreed upon by both teams to be successful – a task made much more difficult if your teams are not operating in the same systems.
Disparate Systems
There are literally hundreds of tools that your sales and marketing teams could use to run their individual motions.
What’s the result? A list of tech tools the size of a Cheesecake Factory menu for your marketing operations team to deal with.
For marketing and sales activities – especially those that require a handoff – data accuracy is everything. And the more tools you have, the lower the chances are that your data is reliable.
Too many systems can lead to:
- Too much context switching and the necessary info not being added to the correct tool
- System syncing issues and resulting data gaps
- No single source of truth for decision-making about the success or failure of your efforts
- Misaligned handoff and scoring criteria
Inconsistent Data
When you have too many tools, weak processes for using your tech, a lack of operational leadership, or any combination of these things, your data suffers. When you can’t trust your data, you are flying blind when it comes to making decisions that impact your customers.
Bad data doesn’t just lead to bad calls because you can’t properly forecast your sales team’s pipeline.
Bad data means that we don’t personalize campaigns, we get the handoff wrong, we put people into the wrong segmented cohorts, and we over or under-touch our prospect accounts.
The truth is that data drives your revenue engine. Everyone in your revenue operations – marketing leaders and implementers, sales managers and reps, and customer success teams – needs data to drive decisions around how they interact with customers
Misaligned Goals & the Battle Over MQLs
All marketers are familiar with this play: gate content to capture an MQL to then send to a sales/business development rep (SDR or BDR, respectively). That SDR/BDR then prospects in concert with marketing to move this person into the coveted SQL lifecycle stage.
Once the lead becomes an SQL, the account executive takes over and closes the deal, won or lost.
This play seems fair enough on its face. It has been used thousands of times by thousands of marketers. But if we’re talking about alignment, this play relies on a process laden with potential land mines.
Think about it: if the marketing team has a goal to drive MQLs and they are assessed based on their ability to meet that goal, their sole focus will be on how to get as many gated content downloads as possible.
What’s the issue with that? Well, it turns out that the audience most likely to read your content is not necessarily the audience that wants to buy your product now.
If sales are judged by the number of MQLs they convert to opportunities, company friction is baked into the system: the marketing team meeting their goals is out of alignment with sales reaching their goals.
Teams focusing on generating MQLs rather than revenue and demand will continue to struggle with alignment and will leave themselves ill-prepared to run ABM campaigns or to provide a seamless experience for their customers.
Running Successful ABM Plays
The final alignment challenge in this series is the challenge of running successful ABM plays with misaligned teams. At the end of the day, you just can’t do it!
All of the problem areas outlined above – poor handoffs, disparate systems, inconsistent data, and arm wrestling over MQLs – prevents an organization from running successful ABM plays, especially at scale.
Why is it so hard to knock your ABM goals out of the park when sales and marketing aren’t talking? It’s because ABM requires that you’re not only aligned on one single MQL or SQL definition – you have to define an entire buying committee. This means even more handoffs, system, data, and goal alignment.
More often than not, alignment is within reach and just takes a little bit of learning and listening, followed by consistent action, to achieve.
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