Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series: Achieving Sales & Marketing Alignment

By Rob Kall, CEO & Co-founder Cien.ai

Does alignment matter?

There is a lot of talk about finding corporate alignment, but what does it even mean? That everyone get along at all times? That there are no differences of opinion? Not at all – all organizations are made up of individuals and those are unrealistic (and often undesirable) objectives.

The most common problems between sales and marketing are usually something like this:

1. Marketing has a lead quota. This quota keeps increasing and Marketing is forced to tap into new channels to meet their numbers
2. Reps receive these leads and are not happy with the quality. Sales voice their concern to Marketing
3. Marketing feeling challenged, points out the shortcomings in the rep follow-up on the leads (e.g. too slow to reach out, or not reaching out enough times, or with a poor message).

The result is a constant blame game where trust erodes and there is no obvious way to improve results. The two teams do not have a shared truth of what the problems are (and usually they both have a point)

So how do you fix poor Sales and Marketing alignment?

The traditional way has been to hold meetings, and perhaps do surveys that aim to tease out what’s going on. That is usually not that effective, except in making awareness of the alignment issues higher. The problem is the lack of a shared truth, and the solution is to measure what’s going on. So, for leads, that means looking at things like propensity to convert into pipeline (MQL –> SQL conversion probability) and the overall ACV (annual contract value) potential of the records generated.  It also means understanding if leads are generally actionable or if they need to be enriched with 3rd party data before being assigned to a rep. 

For reps it means measuring the time it takes for a rep to do their first outreach to a high-propensity inbound lead, and if not immediately successful in converting into a well-qualified pipeline deal, how many times the rep attempts, the level of effort. Does the rep just abandon the lead (most common) or is the rep actively avoiding the lead due to some incurable issue (e.g. too small company)?

What does success look like?

Knowing this allows both Marketing and Sales to up their game, and focus on their performance, instead of attributing issues to a different department, As the CRO of a B2B Company said after going through this: “I felt like my Sales and Marketing teams were like two fighting kids in the backseat. I was about to tell them that I was going to stop the car. Now we’re back on the road and almost there.”

About the Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series.

This article is part of our Growth Essentials Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the non-technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the technical details of how to measure the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Practical RevOps Analytics Series”.

Contact

Rob Kall, Cien.ai, +1 305 496 4404, media@cien.ai, www.cien.ai

SOURCE Cien.ai