If you Google the term “sales alignment,” there’s roughly 60 million results. Go ahead and Google “sales enablement” -- a newer term with similar definitions -- and there’s another one million. On and on through a variety of terms around sales and marketing working well together, you see north of a million results. Clearly it’s something people are writing about and sharing resources on.
If you’ve ever worked in either sales or marketing at a company of virtually any size, you probably understand why this is. Sales and marketing should get along better than almost any two departments you could think of; the work of one (marketing) directly impacts the work of another (sales). But whether you have 10 employees or 100,000, there’s usually a divide here.
I’ve heard sales guys (and women) screaming to their supervisors that leads they’re getting from marketing are “old and cold,” and I’ve heard sales leaders tell marketing leaders that their people can’t find the resources and content marketing is supposedly producing. The marketing leader chirps back: “Sales isn’t using the great stuff we create!” It’s an endless cycle, punctuated only briefly by the hope that sales hit their targets and the executives can brandish that in an all-hands meeting regardless of consistent internal dysfunction.
Forrester, which deals with sales and marketing executives perhaps more than any other consultancy or think tank, wrote a post about the divide between sales and marketing just last summer. Here was a key section:
Over half of respondents — who were predominantly sales or marketing folks — described their working relationship as “Generally OK, but needs work.” The majority also agreed that it’s the combination of three factors:
1) Lack of communication or collaboration between marketing and sales
2) Disparate/siloed systems, data, and processes that aren’t shared between the teams, and
3) Getting measured by different objectives and metrics
“Generally OK, but needs work” shouldn’t be a high-water mark for an organization looking for revenue growth. Let’s take these three factors one at a time.
Lack of communication/collaboration
This is a common problem across many companies, and not just between marketing and sales divisions. If I had to ascribe one reason for it, it’s typically that people who rise to the decision-making level of companies usually aren’t good communicators themselves. As a result of this, ‘communication’ is often seen as a soft skill -- something not tied to revenue -- and we tend to over-value performance on tasks and projects. People who manage tasks and projects well are typically good at those things, but not necessarily good at communicating throughout a company or ecosystem. This is where effective communication falls by the wayside, and it’s often an organizational problem -- not just sales and marketing.
Silo’ed systems, data and processes
This is brutal to see in execution, and yet all too common. Oftentimes a sales team and a marketing team will use different CRM approaches, or have entirely different systems for tracking leads and qualified leads. Since the systems ‘speaking’ to each other typically requires IT or another third party to get involved, that creates more communication headaches. Salespeople will also often follow one process (or set of processes), whereas marketing has an entirely different set. In organizations that embrace ‘process for the sake of process’ (many do), this makes it hard for the teams to communicate. If marketing sends something over to sales, but whatever they sent doesn’t abide by sales’ processes, sales will harp on that instead of determining the utility of whatever marketing just sent. And see, this all happens because…
Getting measured by different objectives and results
This is absolutely the first thing that needs to change in order to see any ROI on sales-marketing alignment. If the highest-ranked person in sales has a totally different set of individual and team metrics to hit relative to his/her bonus and performance review than the highest-ranked person in marketing, there is simply no way for the departments ever to properly align. While intrinsic motivators for work are very tangible in terms of performance, many people chase the metrics and objectives that benefit them or their teams -- so for two teams to be aligned, they need to be accountable to the same things. It’s that simple.
Look at the example above. Marketing sends something to sales. It doesn’t align with sales’ standard processes, so sales doesn’t know what to do with it. They ignore it or bury it as a result of process, and now a potentially valuable piece of messaging for working with a prospect/lead is rarely going to be used. This happens all the time in sales-marketing team relationships, unfortunately.
The metrics issue is even trickier. A sales lead and his/her team is usually bonus’ed and reviewed on tangible, you-can-see-them-on-a-spreadsheet numbers. A marketing lead and his/her team typically is bonus’ed on less tangible elements, or elements tied to sales growth. As a result, sales leads can often think their work is far more important than marketing’s work -- because all the goals run through sales -- and that also creates an imbalance in the relationship.
Because sales and marketing are continuously integrated, the reality is that sales and marketing must be held to the same metrics and review items -- and they should be encouraged to use the same systems and co-define processes. Without that initial step, nothing else can flow forth.
In future posts we’ll look at specific elements of the sales-marketing relationship and how they can be optimized. For now, though, what other examples have you seen in terms of sales-marketing issues?