The age old story of marketing hitting their quarterly leads target giving themselves a pat on the back, while the sales team is infuriated by the lack of them turning into anything of substance. Sound familiar?
In today's complex business landscape, successful CEOs and C-suite leaders recognize that the synergy between sales and marketing is more than a nice-to-have—it's a strategic imperative for revenue success. This blog post dives into the reasons behind the misalignment of these two critical functions, how you probably aren't helping the situation, and why bringing them together is essential for sustained growth.
The Sales and Marketing Misalignment
Recent research from Gartner highlights a stark reality: companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, whereas those without it experience a 4% decline. This disparity underscores the high stakes at play. But why do sales and marketing teams often struggle to collaborate effectively?
Years ago I was heading up the marketing department, and hitting every lead and MQL goal set for us by the CEO and board. But every quarter we had the same feedback from the CEO to say we needed to close deals. Therein lies the issue, the marketing department has a must-have KPI to hit the leads target, but then a nice-to-have task to help sales close deals. All of the marketing team's energy goes into bringing the masses of leads in from events, webinars, paid ads and on the side a few one-pagers for sales are created. There's no joint strategy, terminology, funnel. Why should marketing care, when there is no incentive for them to work together and win together?
Key Insights for CEOs:
Foster a Culture of Collaboration: Encourage open communication and shared objectives between sales and marketing teams. Make collaboration a core value of your organization's marketing and sales strategy. Both teams should be attending a weekly meeting to discuss the MQLs that went to demo, what the result was and why they did or didn't turn into won deals. If done right, this information should help optimize the marketing strategy to get better quality leads.
Invest in Technology: Leverage marketing automation tools and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to facilitate seamless data sharing between sales and marketing. Technology can be a bridge that connects these two departments, enhancing revenue marketing. Marketing should have access to both systems to ensure there is no loss of data and for reporting.
Measure What Matters: Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with both sales and marketing objectives. Ensure that everyone understands how their work contributes to these shared goals of driving revenue growth. Stop measuring leads. Leads do not equal revenue. Set both team's KPIs to demos booked and see the magic take place. The change has to come from the top.