Misalignment Means Misunderstanding
Our marketing team at InsideView conducted an alignment survey of 1,000 B2B sales and marketing professionals (we'll dive deeper into our findings in Chapter 7). We found that neither sales nor marketing really understand what the other does.
Sales perceives marketing as being full of people who spend too much time on branding and events, trying to attract lots of eyeballs without much consideration for how they translate into revenue. Most sales reps assume that this leaves marketers out of touch with the real needs of customers.
In a year, marketing talks to only a fraction of the customers that sales talks to every day, so sales resents marketing's claim to truly know the industry and have accurate customer personas. Worse yet, marketing provides sales with their leads, but they aren't responsible for, nor measured on, pipeline or closed deals.
When marketing looks at sales, they see a bunch of mavericks driven only by quota. A marketer's perception of successful reps is that they can do whatever they want, go weeks without entering information into their customer relationship management (CRM) or other systems, and spend lavishly on expense accounts. Often, marketing thinks sales are coin-operated wheeler-dealers who are driven to find easy opportunities to put money in their pockets.
The presumptions on both sides are wrong, which becomes instantly clear if we look at how each team is measured. In our survey, we found that sales is frequently measured on much more than quota attainment. They have goals for new accounts, renewals, and upsells. We also found that two-thirds of marketers are measured on pipeline, and more than half are measured on lead quality.
What's apparent here is that sales and marketing are made of strikingly different personalities who continue to misunderstand each other's real roles, which are closely intertwined. But miscommunication and misperceptions don't tell the whole story. In fact, they merely scratch the surface and point to deeper, systemic issues within both teams and within most companies – and the problems are getting worse.
Get It Right: Ask Questions that Can Only Be Answered by Aligned Sales and Marketing Teams
Elisabeth Hawkins is the director of demand generation and marketing operations at PagerDuty, an operations performance platform designed to make businesses more reliable. It's a unique role that wouldn't have been thinkable just a few years ago, and it puts Elisabeth at the nexus of sales and marketing alignment. This was especially true as her company transitioned to seeking a new type of customer.
“PagerDuty was focused on smaller companies but wanted to expand to larger enterprise customers,” Elisabeth explained. “It totally changed how we went to market and how our sales teams interacted with customers. We went from relying on free trials as a lead generator to working with large purchasing teams that required different content, presence at events, and complex programs that we didn't have before.”
That fundamental shift in target customer brought many of their misalignment issues to the forefront, and also made it clear that sales and marketing would need to work together if PagerDuty was going to succeed. A key decision to drive alignment was to have marketing take responsibility for revenue, not just leads.
“The strategic change in customer exacerbated all of our existing challenges,” Elisabeth said. “We quickly saw that alignment was critical if we were going to scale. We also saw that marketing should be held to 100 percent of the revenue goal. Every lead encounters some sort of marketing along the way. Sales might have initiated the deal, but they'll get an email or look at some collateral eventually. Now that marketing has responsibility for revenue, they are taken more seriously by sales. It makes marketing more relevant in the eyes of the sales reps.”
Once alignment started happening, it became easier for sales and marketing to quickly move beyond blame when a roadblock appeared and jump right to a discussion of solutions. Like others, including us at InsideView, lead scoring became an instant focal point.
“We wanted to get back to the basics,” Elisabeth added. “We wanted a lead scoring model that everyone could understand and explain. It's also the first critical handoff between sales and marketing, so it's a great place to start working on alignment. Then it's easier to start looking at the other handoff points and hold each other accountable.”
As Elisabeth and her colleagues became more aligned, data became the next obvious focus.
“We started to ask ourselves about the minimum amount of data we needed to achieve our goals,” she continued. “Did we need a lead's industry and number of employees? If so, where was it going to come from? Should we automate it with a service or rely on sales to research it? These were questions that both sales and marketing had to agree upon since we were going to be heavily relying on that data. But then we started thinking about targeting, and we knew based on experience that a great lead for us was a company who was ‘tech forward.’ You can't just buy that data. It's not a typical attribute you enter into a lead form.”
Since the teams at PagerDuty were already well aligned by this point, it was easier to work together with the common goal of growing the business.
“It became a great conversation starter, just asking ourselves who are our best customers and why,” Elisabeth added. “Having those discussions, figuring it out together, and deciding how to make it happen really brought out teams closer together.”
Most sales and marketing teams are so wrapped up in their internal goals and metrics that the “customer” becomes this external, almost imaginary, entity. Sales and marketing think about generating more leads and closing more deals more often than they consider what customers want. This inward focus creates blinders that mask the real, external forces that are causing further fractures and divergence in how sales and marketing work together.
Technology Broke Down Silos and They Grew Back
In the 2000s, enterprise software was the end all, be all to your B2B ills. One of the key benefits, according to software vendors, was the elimination of silos of data created by legacy systems. The promise: Put all of your data into our system and finance can see sales forecasts, customer service can see billing issues, and sales can see marketing touch points. It was a great concept and it worked. But now, with cloud-based tools and new channels popping up, it's easier than ever to add new software tools as you attempt to keep pace.
In a nutshell, here's what has happened: You have too much technology, you have too much data, and everything is constantly changing. It creates distractions and silos, which exacerbate misalignment. We'll dive deeper into this in Chapters 5 and 6.
The Boundary Between Sales and Marketing Is Blurry
Largely due to technology, sales reps and marketers are stepping into each other's role more and more and their tasks are converging. Add to this the extreme level of miscommunication or lack of communication entirely and you have both sales and marketing doing what's best for themselves instead of collaborating on what's best for the customer and the company's growth.
For instance, if a sales rep wants to invite 25 prospects to an event to find more opportunities, they do it without including marketing. Meanwhile, if marketing wants to start working on the automotive market to get more prospects, they do it without any input from sales. Sure, they each might give the other a heads-up, but the focus on remaining independent keeps both groups from considering the full impact of what they're doing and how it affects the other – or the customer.
Your Current Success Shouldn't Fool You
Right now you may be thinking something like, “Well, things are going pretty well at my company without all of this alignment stuff.” Think again. Industry analyst IDC claims