From CMO Revolving Door to Lasting Impact: Achieving Sales-Marketing Alignment

With the average tenure of chief marketing officers (CMOs) decreasing to 37 months and with CMO roles even being eliminated altogether, it is a trying time to be a senior-level marketer. Paramount to achieving success—and proving the value that marketing brings to the boardroom—is sales and marketing alignment. According to Forrester, highly aligned companies grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable than unaligned companies.

But aligning sales and marketing is much easier said than done. How do you actually put this into practice? Here are proven strategies to drive sales and marketing alignment in your organization. Let’s dive in.

Think of It Like a Flywheel

There is a cliché that marketing needs sales, and sales needs marketing. The enablement of these together is a virtuous, continuous cycle—a flywheel, if you will. Marketing impacts sales, sales impacts marketing—facilitating an endless feedback loop of results and learnings—and the faster the flywheel turns, the better.

Accountability to the Same Outcomes

Misalignment occurs when sales and marketing are unable to work together to achieve the same goals. To ensure alignment, choose, track and visualize north-star KPI(s) to show how united efforts drive effective prioritization and progress. This likely will not happen overnight, As leaders, and then as teams, determine the outcomes your teams are responsible for. This will help you agree on your north star (i.e., your lag KPI). What is the most important thing you want to achieve? Use this as your starting point.

Then, analyze the process to achieve this outcome and identify the leading actions that will help you achieve the lag goal. Next, translate your leading actions into KPIs that are predictive and influenceable to achieving the lag KPIs. Once settled on your lag and lead metrics, ensure that what is being done in real life translates to how your systems—such as your CRM and MAP—are being used. Afterward, get your teams bought in.

Have meetings to review your vision, direction, goals and process changes needed to drive the right data. Then translate these down to the individual level: what individual KPIs do your sales and marketing team members need to meet to drive your desired outcome? Finally, create reporting and dashboards that are updated in real-time to reframe the data to greater sophistication.

Unified Leadership

Alignment is essential at the organizational level for sales, marketing and RevOps. Consider having all three teams report to the same leader. Whoever heads up sales, marketing and RevOps must align, too; make this a priority. Growth is a team sport, and by sharing the growth goals, you will be accountable for the same KPIs and keep each other co-accountable to drive results. By rooting in a teamwork philosophy, you more easily remove competing priorities and friction points.

To build trust, communicate frequently, whether via Monday morning standup meetings or monthly team calls with all relevant stakeholders. Constantly review your recurring metrics both in group and individual meetings. Strategically plan together to make sure you are prioritizing and agreeing on the most important work to drive your north-star KPIs.

Same Lens, Fewer Discrepancies

Many sales and marketing teams get stuck when they obsess over MQLs and SQLs. It is time to move beyond that. There is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to traditional sales models that just include MQLs and SQLs as the paths to success. Technology and AI have enabled a better, smarter way to engage your customers and align on a more predictable revenue model. Look at the full funnel; MQLs and SQLs, while important, should not be the end-all, be-all. Reflect on the entire picture, considering customer LTV.

Anchor your focus and efforts around results. That way, marketing will not just care about MQLs, and sales will not just care about SQLs. You will care about how to best find, qualify, close and retain business. When teams work together and build shared processes, a single source of truth comes into view.

Teamwork and Collaboration

Remember the flywheel? Marketing and sales should not be pitted against each other. Instead, sales and marketing should treat each team as internal customers to grow trust and rapport, generate the most impact, and enact a more effective use of resources.

Give the same respect you would give to your customers to team members in the other department. If you view them as customers, the frustration and hubris that sometimes pop up in teams will naturally diminish. You will have more shared learnings. Planning will not be facilitated in a vacuum. Learning and adjusting is key. For example, refine when you learn what works and does not so that the output of marketing reflects sales conversations.

ABM Orchestration

For any B2B lines of business, you likely will consider using ABM since the sales process is more complex when selling to buying committees at accounts instead of just individual buyers. Sales and marketing alignment must happen for ABM to be a success. Instead of having your sales team “choose their own adventure,” which can lead to very diverse clients with diverse needs (and a potentially higher churn rate), be very intentional about the type of clients you can serve and focus your attention on those.

Sales and marketing should work together to define your ICPs, TALs, intent data topics and GTM strategies. Your leaders must be bought in on ABM for it to work from the top down. Take time to educate both teams on the importance of ABM. Find champions within marketing and sales. Start small, with a pilot program, and then roll out your strategy to the rest of the teams.

Aligning Sales and Marketing for Business Success

In following these tips and strategies, you should have some starting points on ways to align your sales and marketing teams around the same goals. Alignment will occur as leaders report to the same outcomes and work in lockstep with one another.

The path forward may be long, but in the end, it will be worth it.

Lindy Jones is VP, Revenue Operations; Gabrielle Keiser is Director of Marketing; and Natalie Canavati is SVP, Business Strategy & Development at Goodway Group.