There’s a reason why talking about marketing and sales team alignment is all the rage right now. 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.
While this alignment has many upsides, there are just as many obstacles to front-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 and a few solutions for making team alignment a reality.
The marketing-to-sales handoff seems simple enough: when a lead becomes qualified for sales (a sales-qualified lead or an SQL), the marketing team’s job is to ensure that their sales colleagues know about it.
What could go wrong? The answer is…a lot.
To generalise, there are two areas where this handoff can go not in the intended way. The first is the qualifying criteria or the agreement around when the right time is to hand the lead off to sales.
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 Teams, or some combination of these options?
Tools like Marketing Hub and Sales Hub are excellent 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.
To address a less-than-perfect handoff from marketing to sales, have a meeting between your marketing operations and sales operations teams to agree on the complete parameters of your lifecycle stages.
Ask your teams what role deal stage, lead score, buying committee makeup, and ICP tier play in the timing and manner of the handoff? Handoffs can change from team to team, ICP tier to ICP tier, and product to product.
Next, pull some reports to see at what lifecycle stage sales became involved in winning opportunities to objectively determine what has been most successful to date.
Finally, once everyone agrees on the terms of your lifecycle stages and when and how sales should be tapped to jump in, update your CRM, marketing automation process, and other technology to accommodate these newly agreed-upon handoff guidelines.
Your sales and marketing teams could use hundreds of tools to run their individual motions. What’s the result? A list of tech tools the size of a pub beer menu for your marketing operations team to deal with.
Data accuracy is everything for marketing and sales activities, especially those requiring a handoff. And the more tools you have, the lower the chances are that your data is reliable.
Too many systems can lead to:
Disparate systems can be harder to solve because organizations may involve multiple internal stakeholders and decision-makers. Nevertheless, there are a few ways to address this issue.
First, you can move all your marketing and sales operations into a single platform like HubSpot CRM, where Marketing Hub and Sales Hub can accommodate all marketing and sales alignment needs and provide a seamless customer experience.
If combining systems is not an option, consider doing an audit of where information is not being collected, synced, and updated between systems. This can impact things like lead scoring and lifecycle stage updates, which are crucial to keeping sales and marketing aligned. Reporting can also be impacted and lead to decisions made on incomplete information.
Additionally, you will want to assess your current systems to ensure they can achieve all of your goals. Can your systems trigger actions in one another to ensure that both sales and marketing stay on the same page? If not, check outside of your tools’ native functionality using platforms like Zapier or Workato.
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 personalise campaigns, get the handoff wrong, put people into the wrong segmented cohorts, and 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.
Often, solving the issue of disparate systems will also solve your data problems. But in instances where that’s not the case, other solutions are in order.
If you are not getting the data you need for sales and marketing to align and make insightful, helpful decisions, your data collection processes might be in the way.
The first thing you will want to do when you’re thinking about your process is to interview your team to see what obstacles are preventing them from adding data. Do you have the most commonly populated properties in the left-side views of the correct records, broken down into sections? If not, then note this down as something you can improve.
Next, consider using automation to tighten up your processes and keep your data clean. For example, can you use automation to create records or move them from stage to stage of a pipeline to ensure that the data surrounding those activities stay accurate? Can you duplicate or update properties using workflows to reduce manual entry?
Finally, ensure that all your systems are sharing data regularly and automatically. This will ensure that everyone and every automation has the right data at the right time. And, of course, condensing your tech stack will help you to keep data consistent.
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 teams 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.
Reach out to your sales counterparts and discuss how you can set up processes, regular stand-ups, and other means of listening to and learning from each other.
Sales can teach marketing a lot. For instance, what happens on calls with MQLs? What objections does the sales team run into over and over? Which content assets do people make mention of in calls?
On the other hand, sales can learn from their colleagues on the marketing side of the house. What content is marketing serving and why? How have they altered the targeting, and how is sales seeing it play out in sales calls? What content is consumed most in deals that result in “closed-won” outcomes?
Once sales and marketing understand one another more, they can make informed choices that help both teams win. Once there is mutual understanding, the teams can begin to have conversations about important choices that can significantly impact the pipeline:
This is a much more productive line of questioning than “Why did you send me so many junk leads this month?”
The final alignment challenge in this series is the challenge of running successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM) plays with misaligned teams. At the end of the day, you just can’t do it!
The problem areas outlined above – poor handoffs, disparate systems, inconsistent data, and arm wrestling over MQLs – prevent 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 MQL or SQL definition, but you have to define an entire buying committee. This means even more handoffs, system, data, and goal alignment.
If you are a HubSpot user, you likely know that you have a cornucopia of HubSpot tools to use for your ABM:
Who says that sales and marketing can’t play well together? More often than not, alignment is within reach and just takes a little bit of learning and listening, followed by consistent action, to achieve.
We work with growing technology companies providing to the healthcare industry who want to position their brand online and become leaders in the market but are overwhelmed by their current processes and technology, making it difficult to align their customer-facing teams to achieve their goals. If this resonates with you, we'd love to hear from you.