One Company, One Winning Team…
Achieving alignment between marketing and sales requires deliberate effort, from a human, process and supporting systems perspective. Unifying these three factors together is part of a winning strategy for B2B tech startups. In the very early stages of a startup’s life, it feels much more natural for teams in different functions, like marketing and sales, to work seamlessly together. This is because there is little internal resistance and no other route to success.
However, as businesses grow and teams become more established and departmentalised, maintaining the same levels of alignment, synergy and collaboration becomes challenging. Both marketing and sales teams operate under the single philosophy of the go-to-market strategy but remain distinct teams with very different roles. However, their respective success depends upon the performance of the other, and a tight alignment between the two is the best way to optimise results.
The Rise of the Silos
Many of a B2B tech startup’s challenges can be acknowledged as the growing pains of success. The bigger the company becomes, the bigger the challenges get. All the good habits that felt so organic in the early days, when everyone worked as a single and seamless unit in a flat management structure, can become lost in the past. As any B2B tech startup successfully scales, one of the consequences is an increasingly complex organisational structure.
Employees start to identify more with their departmental function than the wider business, and this is how silos can impose themselves on the wider organisation. Close company alignment is the continuous effort by the leadership team to optimise operations with efficient and effective processes and ways of working, applied across all business functions. This helps ensure everyone continues to operate as one team, regardless of their individual role, skills, department or geographical location.
Methods of Achieving and Maintaining Marketing and Sales Alignment
Here’s how B2B tech startups can effectively bring their marketing and sales teams together, building a healthy interdependence and setting the foundations for success:
1. People Alignment
Shared Goals and Metrics
One of the most important factors that helps promote marketing and sales collaboration is to align them around shared values, goals and metrics. Revenue and EBITDA targets, for example, are pointless if they remain as a desire or expectation in the head of a founder; they must be clearly communicated and jointly owned by marketing and sales. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), allow you to track performance against targets, such as the number of leads, sales pipeline, won deals, sales conversion rate, customer retention and so on. This helps promote accountability and encourages more seamless working practices. The important company goals on the CEO’s dashboard require both go-to-market teams to pool their resources, combine their efforts and always push in the same direction.
Regular Communication and Collaboration
Marketing and sales teams must engage regularly through joint meetings, brainstorming, workgroups and cross-functional projects. These interactions help prevent the silos from taking over, improve the flow of information, maintain close relationships and ensure that both teams are always on the same page. This allows marketing to present upcoming campaigns to the sales team, who can provide feedback based on their interactions with prospects and customers.
It’s also important for marketing to attend sales meetings and know what deals are forecast, the shape and size of the pipeline and what marketing can do to help accelerate or close opportunities. When a lead is passed over to sales, there is a misconception that marketing’s job is done and now it’s purely up to the salesperson to make the sale. That’s not how collaboration works. Marketing’s job is never done because it must support sales all the way through to winning a deal and continue with retention activity during the customer lifecycle.
Working Together
It’s also a good idea for marketing to attend demo and sales pitch calls to review how well the messaging resonates and how objections are handled. There is no substitute for learning directly from market interactions. Customer interviews reveal important information, such as what they like, what they don’t like and what needs improving about your solution. Their experience and opinions reveal valuable insights that will either validate or challenge your assumptions.
Working together on campaigns, whether outbound calling, product promotions or attending events, is a critical part of acting as one team with a focused purpose, regardless of functional responsibility. Developing a mutual understanding and healthy respect between the teams creates empathy, which assists collaboration, even when there are differences of opinion. Mutual respect and trust take time to build and requires nurturing as they represent part of a startup’s investment that must never be corrupted.
Aligned Leadership, Not Subservience
This is a potentially contentious topic! The CMO and the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) must be close partners, working together as peers within a leadership team, acting as peers and equals, both reporting to the relevant executive, usually the CEO. Unfortunately, there is a growing and concerning trend of both marketing and sales teams reporting into the CRO. In my opinion, this is a grave and naïve mistake for any company. The CRO is almost always someone with a sales background, but marketing and sales teams are very different functions, with distinctive roles and skillsets.
Speaking as someone who has a healthy respect for sales, marketing must never be marginalised and undervalued as a subservient function. This action relegates it to nothing more than a lead generation machine to its sales overlords. On the face of it, this organisational structure may seem like a way to promote alignment and beneficial working practices, but it makes no sense at all and does more harm than good. Founder-CEOs who resort to this reporting line, usually because they think it will be easier for them to manage, are being lazy, demonstrating their lack of appreciation and investment in marketing. Ultimately, they are hampering their own progress and are less likely to achieve success.
Studies suggest that companies attempting to consolidate these two distinct leadership roles will see a decline in the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. It’s much more effective to nurture an aligned leadership of interdependent peers, respectfully working seamlessly with shared values and goals.
2. Technical and Process Alignment
Integrated CRM and Marketing Automation
Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that integrates with your marketing automation platform helps by providing access to the same data, dashboards and reporting. System integration allows for seamless lead handover between marketing and sales, real-time visibility into the sales pipeline and the ability to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns in driving revenue. Reporting and dashboards can be used to show progress against shared goals, keeping both teams focused and aligned with the actions, metrics and outcomes that really matter to the business.
Shared Analytics and Reporting Tools
Shared analytics and reporting tools provide insights into both marketing and sales performance. Giving both teams access to the same systems, dashboards and data accelerates collaboration. Both teams can work together reviewing previous campaign and messaging performance, helping to optimise future strategies. For instance, using tools like HubSpot or Salesforce can help both teams track lead sources, conversion rates and customer behaviour. Allowing both teams to work closely on the same information ensures one single version of the truth that can provide insights and guide joint decision-making.
Content Creation and Asset Management
The process of building awareness, promoting thought leadership, and stimulating demand generation requires multilayered activities and content appropriate for many personas at different stages of interest. Working together, marketing and sales teams can craft highly targeted campaigns for different contacts. Drawing on each other’s knowledge and experience helps everyone understand what information is needed and when. It doesn’t matter where good ideas come from, which is why it’s useful to have input from a broader group of team members at the ideas stage. Salespeople are on the front line talking to customers and prospects every day, so who better to help marketing understand what message is needed and what tactics work best with target prospects?
By collaborating on content creation, both teams can ensure that content assets are aligned with the brand messaging and customer needs. Using technology to co-create and share content between marketing and sales for case studies, white papers, presentations and other sales enablement materials will increase efficiency and success. Managing assets and making them available using repositories and content platforms can help make this more efficient, especially across dispersed teams.
Sales Enablement Tools
Sales enablement is the strategic process of equipping sales teams with the tools, content, training and resources they need to engage prospects effectively and close deals quickly. Although marketing has a part to play, there is an entire industry dedicated to tools that can help bridge the gap between marketing and sales in several specific and helpful ways. Many of them focus on providing sales teams with easy access to relevant, up-to-date content and insights from marketing. These tools also allow marketing to track which content is most effective in the sales process, assisting continuous improvement.
Centralised content libraries are useful for dispersed teams, as they give easy access to the information salespeople need precisely when they need it. This helps streamline the sales process by being highly responsive to requests from prospects. It also means marketing can be confident that salespeople always use appropriate content with the correct brand and messaging, which can be personalised for specific tech buyers. Market research and specific account information also help salespeople reach out to the right target companies, at the right time and with the right pitch to help start a sales conversation.
3. Feedback Loops and Continuous Improvement
Part of working together across different teams establishes feedback loops. Sales teams can inform marketing on the quality of leads, the usefulness of specific content and the effectiveness of different campaigns. This information helps marketing to make useful adjustments to tactics, ensuring continuous alignment with what works best in the target market. For sales teams to have buy-in to the marketing process, it’s important for them to feel they have a voice and that their feedback is valued. This is done by engaging in conversations where salespeople can provide their insights and make requests. Some of the best ideas come from salespeople who have a real insight into what works and what customers think. It may not be possible to action all requests, and you will have to sort the wheat from the chaff; just be honest and transparent about why.
Empowering Faster Growth
By aligning goals, promoting collaboration and leveraging effective processes and tools, your B2B tech startup can create an efficient lead generation system, a seamless customer experience and accelerate the sales cycle. Using tools that allow the use of automated workflows helps streamline marketing and sales processes. Although the continuous process of alignment requires strong leadership, effort and commitment, the benefits far outweigh the obstacles. Closely aligned teams not only contribute to a more cohesive and effective organisation by breaking down silos but also play a crucial role in your ability to scale, compete and thrive. Teams that work together are focused on the overall benefit of achieving company goals, not one team working for itself or simply serving the other. This approach extends to all departments in a startup, whether development, operational or go-to-market, the more aligned they are the more successful your business will be.
You may want to read: “Top 6 Reasons Why Marketing Must Never Report to Sales.”
