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Sales and Marketing Alignment

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Sales and marketing alignment occurs in organizations where sales and marketing teams agree on common goals, strategies, and success metrics.

There’s an interesting thing that happens at organizations where effective sales and marketing alignment occurs—they win. According to a 2010 report by Aberdeen Research, companies who are “best-in-class” at aligning sales and marketing had 20% average growth in annual revenue as opposed to a 4% decline in “laggard” organizations. At many of these companies, the sales and marketing organizations report up to one senior executive responsible for both generating demand AND closing business. At these organizations Sales and Marketing share more than just a c-level executive, they share goals, technologies and processes that allow them to monitor and optimize every stage of every sale, from first touch to closed deal.

Sales and marketing alignment begins with shared definitions: What is a contact? A lead? An opportunity? What are the sales stages? In one post on Eloqua’s blog, “It’s All About Revenue”, Eloqua’s CMO, Brian Kardon, says “When it comes to a common sales and marketing language, I am reminded of the line from the movie “Cool Hand Luke”: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” Kardon sees a failure to agree on definitions as the most common impediment to organizations reaching their revenue potential. Even after organizations have reached agreement, it’s important for them to revisit the definitions annually to ensure that they are still relevant in swiftly changing environments.

Organizations who have done the hard work to agree on definitions next need to work together to set shared goals for the sales and marketing teams. To make this process easier and more transparent, organizations need a shared set of metrics to define the sales/marketing pipeline—to have “one view of the truth". In his blog post, At the Wheel of the Revenue Engine (Sales owns their Pipeline), Alex Shootman, Eloqua’s Chief Revenue Officer, talks about this shared marketing and sales dashboard as the “holy grail” because it allows him to understand the velocity and shape of the sales pipeline and make realtime adjustments to the organization if he sees an opportunity or an issue.

Marketing automation software and CRM systems make such dashboards easier and faster to build, but neither are required to achieve the benefits of sales and marketing automation. However, if sales and marketing teams DO align with technology, the gains in demand creation and sales productivity and can be remarkable. Aberdeen’s report says “84% of the best in class organizations empower marketing with access to CRM.” The report also points to marketing automation capabilities such as lead generation, lead scoring, and lead nurturing as being important drives of sales and marketing alignment in top-performing organizations.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Resources

Fueling the Revenue Engine
Eloqua explains how marketing automation techniques impact lead generation efforts. Results include effective campaign analysis and improved revenue cycle management

9 pages

Guest Post: Stop Selling and Start Helping People Buy
Marketing automation has amazing potential as a way to close more sales, make the selling process more efficient, and help buyers get the content they need. The field is working hard at discovering all aspects of the buying process and how to influence it. With that in mind, I’d like to add my 2 cents.

Revenue Performance Management: The Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage
Eloqua has studied a small group of companies that consistently out-perform their peers. It is not luck. It's Revenue Performance Management (RPM).

I’m an Enabler…
On a scale from one to geek, I’m somewhere around propellerhead. So I’m REALLY excited about attending Dreamforce ’10 this year! I can’t wait to check out all the cool new sales enablement tools I can roll out to the field within the Salesforce.com platform in order to make them wildly successful.

The Key to Number Crushing -- Alignment Between Sales and Marketing
When Sales & Marketing share one-view of the business, the result is accelerated revenue generation.

60 minutes

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