The relationship between sales and marketing can best be described as a relay race.
The marketing team springs from the starting line, curating a high volume of quality leads with potential for conversion, then sprints around the track before passing the baton to the sales team, who races to the finish line to close the deal.
When done well, it’s a seamless process that leads to high revenue. But just as a slow runner or a poor handoff can hamper a relay race, information silos and poor communication can disrupt the revenue flow, which is why having strong alignment between sales and marketing is the key to success.
Just ask Baker Johnson. He’s the chief marketing officer at ujet.cx, a cloud contact center platform for smartphone era CX. Thanks to more than 15 years of experience in the field, he knows the importance of alignment, and the pitfalls that can derail it.
Built In San Francisco caught up with Johnson to learn how ujet.cx has unified its sales and marketing teams through a common set of metrics, strong communication and more.
In your experience, what are the main causes for misalignment between sales and marketing teams?
There’s really only one thing sales teams and leaders want from marketing: more qualified leads that convert into deals. There are countless marketing functions and KPIs to manage toward that goal. The organizations with the greatest alignment are laser-focused and aligned on those requirements, and the process for handoff and closed-loop reporting continually refine that model.
How do you create a common set of metrics to measure success that is understandable to both teams?
Reverse-engineer the funnel.
If you know what your sales targets are for a given period, then you just need to layer in your average close rate, sales cycle length and average deal size to determine how much pipeline is required on day one to meet those goals. Targets for marketing should be a combination of quantity and quality, and can essentially be distilled down to lead volume, acceptance or conversion rate and pipeline.
Align the incentives.’’
What’s the best way to maintain alignment between sales and marketing teams in the long term?
Align the incentives. Marketing team members across all functions should have incentive compensation and performance evaluated primarily or even exclusively on the metrics above. This prevents focusing too much on vanity metrics that don’t move the needle, and gets every team member thinking about how their efforts can impact the one thing that matters most: helping sales grow revenue.
