The Complete Guide To Sales & Marketing Alignment Within Salesforce Marketing Cloud
In this article we’ll go over the symptoms of sales and marketing misalignment to watch out for, the steps you can start taking to ensure proper alignment, and how doing so will help you achieve the results your team desires. Catching any growing rift between your sales and marketing teams early is crucial to maintaining healthy alignment.
Proper sales and marketing alignment is essential for sales and marketing organizations to be able to function at peak performance. Well-functioning alignment ensures that both the sales and marketing teams are working to achieve a common goal, and focus on priorities that are supporting the path to achieving jointly agreed outcomes.
With technology being at the core of sales and marketing operations, it is key to acknowledge that the performance of a sales and marketing team’s technological setup tends to reflect how well a team is aligned. The core systems of reference, in our case the Salesforce Marketing Cloud on the marketing side and the Sales Cloud on the sales side, should be connected around a smooth process in order for subscribers, leads, customers, and accounts to flow harmonically towards more revenues. Proven tools such as lead scoring facilitate the implementation of agreed processes, and native well-designed data integrations, just like the connection between Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, are crucial.
Index
- Sales And Marketing Alignment Defined
- Why Invest in Sales And Marketing Alignment?
- What Does Healthy Sales And Marketing Alignment Look Like?
- The Shift Towards Digital Comes With More Challenges
- What Are Symptoms Of Sales And Marketing Misalignment?
- Additional Challenges and Missed Opportunities
- How Do You Achieve Alignment
- SalesWings’ Impact On Alignment
- Staying on the Leading Edge
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Sales And Marketing Alignment Defined
At the highest level, sales and marketing alignment is a communication, planning, and goal-setting method that allows sales and marketing to work together as one team.
While achieving ‘Sales and Marketing Alignment’ is often a strategic initiative at the executive level that seems to be very theoretical, it is important that people working at enterprises both large and small pay attention to it, even at the ground level. Marketing and sales alignment is a shared system of communication, strategy, and goals that enables marketing and sales to work harmoniously.
Think of sales and marketing teams like of sports teams:
- The goals for each season or the playoffs need to be defined at the club level and communicated to the people on the field
- The strategy and winning tactics to beat each opponent have to be identified by analysts and coaches, and trained ahead
- Training needs to be tailored and held by the right people, then analyzed with technology
- Coaching has to occur on the team in meetings and sessions, and at the individual level
- Offense and defense need to understand how to shift from defense into offense
- Technology facilitates the analysis of performance at every level, and helps with decision making
When interdependent teams work together, they can offer high-impact marketing initiatives, improve sales performance, and reach their destination in time: Revenue Growth.
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Why Invest in Sales and Marketing Alignment?
Simply put: Sales and marketing alignment positions your company to fully realize your marketing efforts and win more deals.
MarketingProfs’ findings put some numbers to it: fully aligned businesses can see up to 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher win rates. If you take your current deal win rate, and increase it by a fraction of the 38%, would that be a good enough reason?
Such impact occurs thanks to a string of enhancements that occur when sales and marketing teams are collaborating well together by deploying the right processes, communication measures, and technologies.
Let’s take a concrete example: Aligning sales and marketing operations teams around top priority leads and accounts.
Doing so can be achieved by deploying a user-friendly lead scoring tool, and is known to shorten deal cycles by providing an orchestrated focus on leads that are valuable and that are more likely to buy soon. MarketingProf’s mentions around this subject that upwards of 50% of a salesperson’s time is wasted on unfit prospects. With lead scoring, your aligned teams can focus on nurturing the prospects that matter most, cutting down your sales cycle. And that is just one of many examples.
Sales and marketing alignment brings a range of benefits to your bottom line, and on the way increases day-to-day work for your key revenue team.
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What Does Healthy Sales And Marketing Alignment Look Like?
Sales and marketing teams aren’t behaving at times like cats and dogs for no reason; it might be due to a lack of sales and marketing alignment, which is when sales and marketing teams work together effectively to generate leads, prioritize the right leads at the right time, and close business consistently whether it is new, or upselling. Organizational performance is affected when both teams are out of sync, resulting in low lead generation volumes or inefficient handover processes between marketing and sales. Friction between sales and marketing is usually caused by competing goals with unclear cooperation measures. It’s time to call a ceasefire, regroup, talk, and rebuild when this happens.
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Lead scoring in journey builder facilitates sales and marketing alignment tactics such as lead handoff.Sales and marketing alignment as it relates to the marketing and sales technology teams often starts with sales operations and marketing operations.
“What is a good lead?” is the first question where both teams need to be aligned on.
A good exercise to understand if sales and marketing is aligned around what a good lead looks like, sounds a bit like a murder investigation:
- Put a marketing operations person in one room
- Put a sales operations person in another room
- Unless both key managers give the same answers: there is a risk of misalignment.
Use a jointly agreed upon lead, contact, or account list to align on lead handoff, ensure high lead acceptance rates, and avoid ignored leads.This is where What Is Lead Scoring becomes useful in the workflow.
The marketing operations team is ultimately serving the sales teams with leads and must ensure they are either pre-qualified or come with meaningful data to prioritize leads such as lead scoring. In a state of good alignment, the following areas around Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud are well defined:
- Who is measuring lead acceptance rates?
- Who is responsible for a feedback loop from sales to marketing?
- Who is responsible for lead qualification?
- Where and how are leads handed off? In Journey Builder? In a Salesforce report?
Salesforce Sales Cloud flows or process builder are technological tools supporting sales and marketing alignment via process automation.Teams must have a coordinated strategy, shared accountability, and quantifiable goals that both teams agree to pursue. As it relates to lead management, goals may be set around:
- lead acceptance rates
- lead qualification rates
- qualified leads-sent-to-sales in a given time frame
The need for frequent and direct contact between sales and marketing cannot be overstated. Sales cycles are shorter and ROI is generally higher for both departments when marketing and sales teams work together to achieve common corporate goals. Last but not least, it also boosts production and morale.
According to Forrester Research, only about 8% of companies have strongly aligned sales and marketing teams. This means that the other 92% of businesses are not achieving the results that they could be.
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“Wasted spend” is another area where sales and marketing misalignment leads to inefficiencies. According to ITProPortal, that exact figure is close to $1 trillion (not billion) a year. This only emphasizes the fact that to maximize your marketing budget to its fullest you will need to take every step possible to properly align your marketing and sales efforts. Watch our video on sales and marketing alignment within Salesforce Marketing Cloud below.
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The Shift Towards Digital Comes With More Challenges
The world of business has changed more in the last two decades than in the past century. According to Forbes, 93% of companies in the B2B sector conduct some if not all of their business online. Every year the market shifts to be more digital than ever, so it raises the question, what does this mean for the collaboration between the marketing and sales departments?
The answer is simple—challenge the old, and consider the new. While traditional marketing techniques do have their place, even in a modern digital-focused marketing plan, it is important to adapt to the ever-changing market. Take a look at the following consumer behavior statistics that emphasize our point:
- In terms of B2B expectations, it’s not surprising that most business buyers (85%) expect sales reps to show they clearly understand the buyer’s business, but 57% also say reps lack that knowledge. (Salesforce)
- “84% of business buyers are more likely to buy from a company that demonstrates an understanding of their business goals. “Lead profiling” is key to sensing clients in a digital world”.
- 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 54% say it generally feels like sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share information (Salesforce)
- 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 54% say it generally feels like sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share information (Salesforce)
This is why misalignment is so important to remedy in 76% of the cases. Your customers will start to lose faith in your sales team when they don’t get what your marketing team promised. Misaligned departments send customers mixed signals that understandably break their trust in your business.
A clever way to support alignment is to send sales alerts straight from journey builder when leads reach specific scoring thresholds.
What Are Symptoms Of Sales And Marketing Misalignment?
Nearly all businesses experience some degree of sales and marketing misalignment ranging from minor to extreme misalignment. Before we can remedy any misalignment, we need to be able to identify the symptoms of misalignment.
Symptoms range from easily identifiable issues such as lead quality and missed KPIs stemming from fundamental problems such as mismatched ideal customer profiles (ICP) between departments and dwindling interdepartmental communication. Misalignment will differ from business to business, but with these symptoms in mind, you’ll know exactly what to look out for.
Mismatched ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are arguably one of the most common reasons for sales and marketing misalignment. To adjust to an ever-evolving market, both the sales and marketing departments have most certainly revised and adjusted their ICPs within their department, but yet more often than not they are not aligned departments. If you’re not aligned on “what a good lead looks like”, even great solutions from the AppExchange for lead management for Salesforce Marketing Cloud won’t save you.
According to Verse, only 7% of salespeople said leads they received from marketing were qualified.
With such wildly differing ICPs, the logical consequence is that a sales department might struggle to convert a marketing qualified lead (MQL) into a sales qualified lead (SQL). Mismatched ideal customer profiles may also lead to a confusing/conflicting customer journey which may leave a user feeling unsure about partnering with your business and growing cold.
Misalignment leads to lower lead quality, which has a range of negative implications both on the performance and morale of sales reps. Similar to mismatched ICPs, lead quality is a representative measure of sales and marketing misalignment. To ensure lead quality is high when they arrive via the marketing operations to sales, lead scoring is a great methodology. Read our ultimate guide to lead scoring here.
Improper alignment can cause leads to be farther back in the customer journey and colder than anticipated, causing premature contact. While this result of poor lead quality can be remedied with proper lead scoring, the overall lead quality can only be improved with proper alignment.
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Predictive lead scoring for Salesforce Marketing Cloud can support sales teams with visual prioritization to identify hot accounts and opportunities..
The MQL-to-Opportunity or MQL-to-SQL rate is an excellent KPI to measure to monitor proper alignment. That exact percentage will be dependent on your business’s industry, length of the sales cycle, and a whole slew of other factors, but monitoring your MQL-to-Opportunity Rate over an appropriate time frame (based on your average length of the sales cycle) can help keep it in check.
Ignored leads and a low MQL-to-Opportunity rate means your team is leaving revenue on the table ( $5 million in this case).Another symptom of sales and marketing misalignment we’ll go over in detail is the bane of businesses the world over—poor interdepartmental communication. Interdepartmental communication is both a symptom and a solution to misalignment. We’ll go over how to improve communication later, but for now, we’ll go over how to pinpoint dwindling interdepartmental communication.
As grueling as meetings may seem to some, they are a necessity for any high-performing team. Lacking communication during product/service launches, project development, campaign creation, and more can lead to neither the marketing nor sales department being on the same page. This leads to incredibly problematic scenarios such as entire campaigns with mismatched ICPs or worse.
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Additional Challenges and Missed Opportunities
In a market with an ever-changing and complex buying cycle, the benefit of a properly aligned team is invaluable. The market produces challenges that may not be symptoms of misalignment but can be remedied with proper alignment.
Being unable to track marketing ROIs accurately, implementing marketing budget increases with little to no impact, and a seeming increase in leads going cold are all challenges a business may face that can be remedied with proper alignment.
Marketing Budget Impact Due to Missing Feedback Loop From Sales
A positive effect of proper alignment is the impact it can have on your marketing budget. Without any feedback loop from the sales team on the quality of leads, a marketing team could be wasting their budget delivering the wrong leads to the sales team. Without any alignment, the marketing team might attribute their lack of success to a campaign’s budget—increasing it in hopes of higher returns. What they don’t realize is that they are only going to bring in more unqualified leads. The marketing team should also monitor their lead generation’s success, by setting up the right dashboards to understand lead qualification rates. To get the impact you are looking for with a marketing budget increase, you need to ensure first that your teams are aligned. According to Maestro Group, Companies with proper sales and marketing alignment generated 208% more revenue from marketing efforts.
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Tracking marketing ROI
Another challenge that a business may be facing is the inability to clearly track ROIs. Columbia states that 65% of CMOs are unable to properly measure their marketing ROIs due to misalignment.
In today’s complex market with long and complicated marketing and sales cycles, it can be difficult to pinpoint when and how exactly a lead was converted. When you are unable to fully track a customer’s journey, you can’t get a clear picture of your ROIs.
This could cause hot leads to grow cold, leads to be contacted at the wrong times, and more wasted spend. If you’re having a hard time tracking ROIs and customer journeys, you may just have a misalignment issue.
Marketing teams can set up dashboards to measure lead quality by campaign or channel using attribution solutions for Marketing Cloud like SalesWings..
How Do You Achieve Alignment?
Now that we have laid out the symptoms of and challenges created by sales and marketing misalignment, it’s time to solve them. While there may not be a “one size fits all” solution to achieve alignment, we can take every step and precaution we can to get near proper alignment.
Alleviating any amount of misalignment is a step in the right direction. While you take your strides towards proper alignment keep a close eye on your KPIs to monitor your progress. The following steps and tips get you started in the right direction:
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Lead Scoring as a Strategic Tool To Reach Alignment
Lead scoring identifies prospects that are ready to be passed on to sales teams by quantifying the lead’s potential from an interest (“behavioral lead scoring”), and fit perspective (aka “lead grading”).
Behavioral lead scoring empowers your sales and marketing teams with the insight they need into a lead’s level of interest in your business, based on their interaction with your business on digital channels. These “buying signals” as they are also called can be a variety of lead activities. Indicators can be activity-based which includes actions such as website visits, ad clicks, whitepaper downloads, email reads, etc.
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Lead scoring engages leads by showing relevant call-to-actions in emails based on lead scores using Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s dynamic content feature.Using profile scoring or “lead grading”, a lead’s score is calculated using predetermined values assigned to specific profile attributes of a lead. This includes details such as their position/title within their company, the number of employees at their company, their industry, and so on. It is a great tool to measure to what extent a lead matches one of the Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) of a lead. Click here to learn more about SalesWings’ lead fit scoring.
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What does lead scoring have to do with alignment?
Sales and marketing alignment and lead scoring go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, according to the Aberdeen Group, “[lead scoring] is essential to driving lead conversions and connecting marketing to sales.” Lead scoring by nature requires the sales and marketing teams to come together to define the indicators, scoring system, and define when a lead is passed from marketing to sales. The collaborative nature of lead scoring encourages more genuine interdepartmental cooperation and communication; helping your departments move closer towards having proper sales and marketing alignment.
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1. Align marketing and sales on your ideal customer profiles
As mentioned earlier, mismatched ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are one of the most common symptoms of misalignment. The reason is simple: over time the ICP of each department is sure to change to match the market and its trends. Here are two ways to remedy mismatched ICP:
A) Focus on clearly defining your ICP
With time the sales team has most likely narrowed down their ideal customer profile, but often the marketing team may have broadened their ICP in hopes of obtaining more potential leads.
Both departments need to work in conjunction to define and alter their ICP to ensure that qualified leads are sent to sales.
B) Create unideal profiles
It can be easy to overlook but creating unideal customer profiles (often referred to as ‘no-go’ profiles) is a must to prevent any time or budget from being wasted on a lead that is guaranteed to be unqualified.
Richard Conn puts this simply: “Chasing prospects who are only ever likely to prove fruitless is a big waste of time and money.” Unideal customer profiles need to be defined by both the sales and marketing teams in unison.
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2. Get your customer journey right
Mapping your customer journey allows you to find and address customer pain points within your buying process. It is important to map your marketing content and actions to customer journeys that are relevant to a variety of buyer personas. Doing this is an effective way to accelerate your buyer funnel and ensures that leads are qualified when they arrive to the sales team.
Having both the sales and marketing team involved in the mapping of the customer journey can ensure that both teams are on the same page when it comes to customer expectations. Operating without mapped customer journeys leaves you and your teams making critical decisions in the dark. According to Salesforce, only 29% of enterprises consider themselves ‘effective’ at creating a cohesive customer journey as opposed to 40% of small businesses. That leaves 70% of enterprises making assumptions about their customer’s experiences and expectations.
Mapping relevant content to personas and their customer journey
The key to properly mapping your customer journey is customer relationship management (CRM). According to Findstack, 74% say that CRM solutions give them better access to customer data, allowing for more personalized service. With Salesforce, you can ensure that your marketing content and actions within your customer journeys are relevant to unique personas. When integrated with Salesforce, SalesWings allows for true 360° customer journey tracking. Understanding metrics such as scroll depth, funnel/shopping cart drop out, video interactions, clicks to external pages, PDF views, or the users’ referrer are all incredibly useful for mapping your customer’s journey. Learn more about SalesWings’ 360° customer journey tracking.
Furthermore, using a CRM such as Salesforce will also allow you to monitor your customer experience by focusing on often overlooked measurements such as retention rates and overall customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers equal referrals. A study done by Invesp states that leads generated from a referral have a 30% higher conversion rate than leads generated by other marketing measures. Monitoring and maintaining your customer satisfaction is key to keep those referrals coming.
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3. Marketing first
We’ve all heard the adage “take a marketing first approach” time and time again and there’s a good reason for it. According to Charlie Cook, conversion rates for cold calls are typically about 2%, compared to 20% for solid leads and 50% for referrals.
This demonstrates the importance of marketing first. Given that the marketing and sales teams have agreed upon an ICP, allowing the marketers to warm up a potential lead prior to sales interacting with said lead is crucial in today’s sales climate to achieve higher conversion rates getting in touch with your leads at the right time.
Customer journey tracking and lead profiling, are a great step towards taking a marketing first approach. With lead scoring, your marketers will nurture leads properly until they are ready to be hand over to sales. With the right lead scoring system, your sales team will have an easier time closing deals with hot leads.
4. Get your teams talking again
Poor interdepartmental communication is the bane of businesses the world over. While it may be the most obvious out of the sources of sales and marketing misalignment, it can be easy to overlook. This is imparted to its simplicity and obviousness. Now how can we get the two departments talking again? We have solutions.
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Discussing and following joint KPIs in weekly meetings
Having your marketing and sales departments track joint key point indicators (KPI) which you are reviewing once a week in a discussion, is an excellent way to stir some collaboration and peacefulness. To keep each team accountable, sales need to consistently use the CRM to provide feedback and data on the leads; whereas marketing will use this data to understand the customer journeys effectiveness.
Sales and marketing can then use KPIs such as MQL to Opportunity Rate per Channel or Closing Rate Per Marketing Campaign, making your organization focus on what really matters for your revenue growth.
Peter Watson sums this up on LinkedIn, “…they [KPIs] provide your team with clear goals, a plan of action, and a simple way to assess their performance.”
Interdepartmental checks & balances
An underlying cause of misalignment is a lack of communication between departments. Another way to ensure that this line of communication is not severed is to tie the teams together around key tasks.
Give them “checks & balances” by having projects and campaigns have more cross-departmental authorization and say in matters. After all, the sales department has to secure the sale, they deserve some say in the target of a marketing campaign or blog post. Having salespeople review case studies, blog posts, or else, is a clever way to ensure it sends out the right message.
Remove negative competition
Negative competition does nothing but strain relations within your company and hurts overall business performance. One example of negative competition includes KPIs that pit departments against each other and “punishment” competitions (EX. Loss of holiday bonus if goals are not met). Negative competition can lead to departments overstepping each other for selfish gain.
The key is that the final goals align (sales/revenues). Some competition can benefit businesses such as bonuses for top performers or commission sharing amongst teams.
While the aforementioned examples of competition can be lighthearted, fun, and pump some much-needed energy into a department, negative competition will do nothing but harm.
To circumvent toxic alignment around goals, use positive competition to foster more interdepartmental cooperation—we’re playing for the same team after all.
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Saleswings’ Impact On Alignment
In 2016, SalesWings was approached by The Princeton Review with a problem. Although their marketing team was successfully sending lead after lead to The Princeton Review’s website—the sales team was struggling to prioritize all the leads. Without proper lead qualification, the sales team couldn’t differentiate hot leads from cold leads. This lack of lead prioritization guidance from the marketing team lead to wasted time and prematurely contacted leads. The solution was proper lead scoring.
Within only one week, SalesWings was implemented into The Princeton Review’s website, their contact forms, and Salesforce, and an initial scoring increased the marketing team’s ability to hand over leads with more confidence about its quality.
The results were noticeable immediately. Within the first few weeks, their sales reps closed an additional 160 deals over the previous period. With SalesWings’ intuitive predictive lead scoring, The Princeton Review’s sales team could now reliably contact hot leads. Christopher Penn, the Vice President of Sales and Admissions Counseling at The Princeton Review noted that “It [SalesWings] significantly enhanced our view on who the best leads are.” The results speak for themselves—SalesWings allowed their marketing teams efforts to be fully realized by sales.
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Staying on the Leading Edge
Keeping up with the latest trends and changes in business is critical for companies to thrive in the digital age. Aligned teams can keep your business on the leading edge. Innovations such as AI-driven marketing tools are the future and present of marketing and sales. According to Forrester, leveraged intent data surpasses what sales reps can determine on their own. Intent data keeps you one step in front of the consumer. Leveraging intent data empowers your sales and marketing departments to successfully guide leads through your customer journey and convert them with ease. This is why at SalesWings we use predictive lead scoring to provide your teams with the intent data they need to stay on the leading edge of business.
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Closing Statements
While ‘sales and marketing alignment’ may just seem like another phrase to add to the never-ending list of corporate buzzwords—that couldn’t be further from the truth. Proper alignment is a driving force for successful enterprises and small businesses alike. From being able to accurately budget with measurable marketing ROIs and higher conversion rates with lead scoring, the road to proper alignment benefits businesses of any size from startups to enterprise-level firms. Start closing more deals today by finding out how SalesWings can help your alignment with lead scoring.
