How to align
sales and marketing

For B2B services

Want your revenue-generating teams to be even somewhat optimized? Then they need to be working closely together and marching in the same direction.

The first thing to do is to assess how healthy the relationship is now.

Assessment – unhealthy indicators:

  1. Sales and marketing don’t interact on a regular basis. No, a regular basis is not a monthly or quarterly meeting you have to report various metrics to each other on how things went (I actually don’t think this style is very useful overall). A regular basis is getting together as the need arises (often every handful of days) to discuss various tactical topics (content, opportunity analysis, etc). The timing should be driven by a need, not a regularly scheduled event.
  2. Consistently de-prioritizing / brushing off engaging with each other. Of course each group has some aspects of work that won’t directly involve the other, but if one group feels the other is usually brushing off their efforts to engage, they’ll each start going off in their own direction and ignoring each other.
  3. They complain about how the other group isn’t doing their job. You’ll hear comments like “I find all my own leads.” or “We provided sales with X leads last month, but they only followed up with 20% of them.”.

How to improve alignment

Here are 6 improvements to encourage your marketing and sales teams to work better together:

  1. Work together on company direction and strategy
  2. Agree on your most important sales channels
  3. Create common goals
  4. Work together on content creation
  5. Work together on identifying the characteristics of your best customers
  6. Work together to understand / analyze opportunities

Work together on company direction and strategy

Sales, marketing, and leadership should work hand-in-hand on company direction and strategy. By company direction, I mean topics like:

  1. Are we trying to grow, stay flat, or shrink, as an organization? Why? How?
  2. What areas of business are we actively trying to pursue? Why? How?
  3. What areas of business are we passively okay with obtaining, but don’t want to pursue? Why?
  4. What areas of business are we turning away? Why? How?
  5. Who are our favorite customers? Why?

Agree on your most important sales channels.

Assuming you work for a smaller company (i.e. less than a couple hundred employees), you likely can’t afford to focus heavily on more than a ~2-3 sales channels at any point in time. That means you need to pick which areas to focus your efforts, and have sales and marketing working jointly on maximizing the utility of these channels. Some common choices are:

  1. Referrals
  2. Partner channels
  3. Inbound
  4. Trade shows and conferences
  5. Account-based marketing and sales
  6. Social media
  7. Partner channels
  8. Search marketing

These shouldn’t change that frequently, as each channel takes a long time (years) to explore. Sales and marketing should be in sync with which channels you’re actively exploring. You can dabble with one more on the side, but don’t dilute yourself too much or else you decrease your odds of rising above the noise for any one channel.

Create common goals

Goals are great! They help people align and march in the same direction. You want goals.

Here are some goals worth considering:

  1. Increase the number of sales-ready leads.
  2. Increase awareness of your company.
  3. Increase the amount of support content available to the sales team.
  4. Increase the number of opportunities with existing customers.

Do yourself a favor with these goals: they should be used to set direction, not to beat people over the head. Fear of not hitting a particular target (eg. 30% more opportunities with existing customers in 12 months) is not going to get you where you want to be. There are too many factors outside the team’s control (e.g. evolving market forces, competition, human behavior/psychology) to create anything more than a directional goal, but a directional goal should be enough to keep the team bonded together.

Work together on content creation

Almost every method of selling you consider will involve content creation. Content can include things like:

  • articles,
  • case studies,
  • white papers,
  • webinars,
  • landing pages,
  • etc.

You want your content to be customer-centric.

Who better to involve than the people that are closest to your customers?

While sales doesn’t need to be involved in every piece of content created, you want them involved with content that they have knowledge around and a vested interest in. They should be involved in the topic selection process and provide insights in areas that they have direct knowledge about.

Work together on identifying the characteristics of your best customers

Your sales team has direct contact with your best customers. To make this exercise effective, you need to:

  1. Reduce recency bias – it’s real easy to recall the last few opportunities that you worked on. It’s much harder to think back over several years. But thinking back over years is generally appropriate. Take your time here. Be comfortable with the silence during the discussion.
  2. Capture a broad cross-section of perspectives – each sales person is going to have their own set of customers that they interact with. This may be divided up by industry, application, or geography. This creates an inherent bias that needs to be calibrated.
  3. Focus on externally-observable information. If you’re identifying information that’s very hard to know as an outsider, you’re going to have a very hard time identifying other companies with these characteristics.
  4. Avoid self-centered and totally ambiguous characteristics. Characteristics like “our favorite customers are those that really value what we do for them” or “our favorite customers are ones that are easy to work with” or “our favorite customers are the ones that have large budgets”. None of those are actionable at this level. You’re going to have to dig deeper.
  5. Boil down the total number of characteristics to a manageable number. If you capture a dozen characteristics, that’s probably too many to do anything with. 3-6 is much more manageable, depending on the complexity of the characteristics.

Work together on an as-needed basis to understand / analyze opportunities

As leads come in and corresponding opportunities arise, you need to discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly on a regular basis in order to stay in sync with each other on direction. And trust me, there will be the bad and the ugly. Expect it, and accept it.

Details will vary somewhat based on your organizational structure, but start with these things in mind:

  1. Keep the group as small as possible. One on one is great in most cases. One person from sales, and one from marketing.
  2. You want the timing of when to get together to be driven by when there’s something useful to talk about. Do NOT tie it to a weekly or bi-weekly meeting. This sucks the life out of everyone involved. There are two main triggers to have a discussion about opportunities:
    • A new lead of interest just knocked on the door and either sales or marketing has something they want to convey to the other about the lead. Sometimes this can be handled via email, and other times it can just be brought up as part of another meeting.
    • A pattern is emerging that you want to discuss. This could be something to do with the application, industry, role, or process across a group of opportunities.
  3. Make sure to discuss the “why” behind a won, lost, or stalled opportunity. You want to learn from each other regarding what’s working, what’s not, areas for improvement, etc.

Next Steps

So now what? Do you want some help getting your marketing and sales better aligned?