Is that what your sales team says about the folks in marketing? Do you harbor your own negative thoughts about your counterparts in sales? Ever wonder how you might get these two hearts to beat as one?

For insight on how one might enable and encourage sales and marketing to work together effectively and productively, in this third episode of the Marketing Smarts podcast, we took up that very topic with Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot.

The root of all discord in the relationship between sales and marketing is “a broken definition of a lead,” Mike insists, which means that taking a close look at your business and clearly defining “sales qualified leads,” is the first step towards putting the relationship on a more harmonious footing.

Once you’ve all agreed on what a lead is, you need to set specific goals on how many of these marketing is going to produce every month, every quarter, every year. At the same time, the sales organization has to commit to marketing that they will follow up on leads with a certain frequency within a specific timeframe.

In other words, the collaborative definition of a qualified lead needs to be reinforced by a reciprocal accountability as to what happens with leads once you have them. Interestingly, at HubSpot, this accountability is formalized via Service Level Agreements (SLA) set up between sales and marketing.

The third pillar of a good working relationship between sales and marketing is measurement, and specifically, frequency of measurement. As Mike points out, you don’t want to find out at month’s end that you only generated 800 leads when the goal was 1,000. Measuring on a monthly or even on a weekly basis will not give you enough time to course correct if things are getting off track.

The sooner you know if you are in danger of missing your goal, the better. For this reason, Mike measures his team’s progress on a daily basis. Doing so allows him to stay agile, re-prioritizing and re-focusing activities in real-time to catch up when it looks like lead production is lagging.

Finally, Mike stresses, as in any relationship, communication is key and so, naturally, there has to be solid communication between sales and marketing for things to work properly. In Mike’s case, this starts at the top with monthly meetings between the sales and marketing management teams, but it doesn’t stop there. Ongoing communication between sales and marketing translates into greater customer insight and can serve as the source of new ideas and new marketing initiatives.

We cover this and much more in the current episode of Marketing Smarts, so you might want to give it a listen, which you may do here:

Of course, you can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes!

Transcript: Marketing Smarts – Episode 3- Mike Volpe

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I think the real reason is that the misalignment between marketing and sales is not actually the real problem. It’s actually a symptom of deeper problems:

• Lack of process
• Aligning around the wrong things
• Mismanaged sales quota

Lack of Process

According to several recent studies, up to 80% of leads do not get the proper follow-up. So, not surprisingly, one of the biggest challenges facing marketers is delivering qualified leads.  But in most organizations, there are multiple definitions for “qualified leads,” depending on who you speak to. This inconsistency helps contribute to the misalignment.  This challenge faced by organizations is most often because marketing and sales do not share a set of common definitions for terms such as “lead,” “qualified,” “prospect,” etc.  Marketing and sales have not collaborated on defining a process framework that answers fundamental questions, such as “What is the definition of a ‘qualified lead’ for our company?”

Marketing and sales should work together to define a Lead Management Framework, including:

• data process
• lead planning process
• lead routing process
• lead qualification process
• lead nurturing process
• metrics process

Organizations that do so will benefit by having:

• A set of common definitions for managing leads
• SLAs and business rules for lead routing
• A lead scoring model that delivers quality leads to sales
• Lead nurturing communications for those not ready to buy
• A host of other benefits.

As one customer stated after developing their process,  “Marketing and sales used to pass in the halls and not even look at each other.  Now we pass and give high fives because we know we are a team.”

Aligning to the Wrong Thing

One of the obstacles that marketing and sales organizations face when looking to align is their own misunderstanding on what alignment should be based. They’re aligning around the wrong thing. For example, marketing may want sales to come their way and think about campaigns. Sales on the other hand, may ask marketing to start thinking about collateral support for helping to close deals. These examples are not alignment; they are just trying to get the other side to view the world their way. The truth is that the right thing around which marketing and sales teams should align are their buyers.

Today’s B2B buyer is looking to engage with their vendors and have a relevant 1-1 dialogue. They don’t care about the internal squabbles that may occur between marketing and sales teams. They want to feel attended to. So, marketing and sales need to collaborate on how to have the dialogue with the buyer.

There are three key areas on which this collaboration should focus. The first is identifying the ideal buyer profile.  Having this profile (or profiles—most companies will have multiple personas/profiles unique to each service or product offering) ensures that marketing and sales will be engaging with the same targeted buyer.

Secondly, it’s vital to create a map for each profile’s buying cycle. This is more than just time to sale. It’s a full understanding of the buying journey of each persona to whom your organization sells.  Understanding and defining the buyer’s journey will allow you to “walk in your customers’ shoes,” helping both marketing and sales to better understand what they need at each stage, and to engage them in meaningful dialogue.

The third area of focus, once you have identified the personas and mapped out the buyer journey, is to develop your offer and content maps. These maps are guides that will enable you to deliver the most relevant content to the buyer at every stage of the cycle. Communicating based on an offer/content map will improve the alignment with your buyer, enable 1-1 engagement and deliver a more qualified and educated prospect to sales.

Mismanaged Sales Quota

One of the biggest obstacles marketing and sales organizations face in trying to align is the issue of quota.

I remember a conversation I had with a sales VP at a company I used to work for where I ran one of the global marketing teams. It was about half-way through the quarter, and he was panicking because his team’s performance was not what he needed to attain quota. During the conversation he looked at me and said, “I know we agreed on a strategy at the beginning of the year, but right now I need revenue. I’m telling my team to ‘chase it and sign it’ or else I won’t be here to work the strategy for the second-half of the year.” What was I to say to that?  This guy and some members of his team were fighting for their jobs. At the very least, I appreciated his candor.

The quarterly quota pressure is felt in organizations every 90-days. But this pressure would be easy to alleviate if organizations would begin to align their sales compensation plans to the buying/sales cycle (see customer alignment above). In the scenario I mentioned above, we had statistics that showed that the average buying time was 180 days. Yet we were telling our sales folks they had to sell in 90 days.

This quota pressure was not only causing panic in my sales counterparts, but it kept us from alignment with them as well.  Sales had bypassed the agreed to strategy in exchange for demanding only hot leads.  With that pressure there was no talk of nurturing, dialogue, buyer journeys, etc. They wanted leads they could close today!

This issue is easy to resolve and it’s something most organizations should seek to address early in 2011. The simple fix is to align sales quota to the customer buying cycle. This could result in either lengthening or shortening the quota cycle: If you have a 30-day sales cycle, then adjust your quota accordingly; if it’s 180 days, do the same. By adjusting your sales compensation to reflect the buying patterns of your buyer, you will not only provide your sales people a less pressure-filled environment in which to sell, you will better align with marketing and more importantly your buyer and marketing will be able to develop a demand generation strategy based on the buying cycles.

As we begin a new year, let’s stop addressing the symptom of marketing and sales alignment and begin working on some of the fundamental problems that are causing the symptom. It would be great if at this time next year, we could write about success stories instead of repeating ourselves on how to solve the problem.

I am a B2B marketer and, for some time, have felt compelled to write to all of you about the often discussed yet never solved marketing and sales alignment gap. In no way is the intent of my letter to cast aspersions upon you or point the finger for the gap that exists between us. This letter is meant to serve as an apology to all of you on behalf of all of us B2B marketers (and since I am writing on behalf of all B2B marketers, I will speak as the collective “we”).

We hope this letter is accepted with the sincerity in which it was written. We hope it can be the start of something transformational between marketing and sales. We truly believe that to adapt to the changing B2B buyer, we must work together in a collaborative fashion and that, in doing so, we will deliver incredible value to our customers and increase our companies’ revenue exponentially.

We know that we have a rocky past, but we are committed to a healthy future together. To get there, we vow that we will build our relationship in the future by doing the following:

We Will Listen

As marketers, we’re aware of our tendency to talk. We are full of good ideas, and we are aware of our ability to make things look pretty. We are also aware of our aptitude for pulling numbers and putting them in PowerPoint presentations to show how successful our marketing campaigns have been. However, we have also come to realize that we are really bad at listening. Sure, we know that every once in a while we send an email asking for sales input, but in reality, we haven’t given your responses  much consideration. Starting now, that will change. We will continually involve you in our work. We want to know what you need from marketing to be successful. We want to know what you mean when you use the word “lead” so that we can deliver quality ones to you. And not only will we listen, but we’ll translate that listening into action.

We Will Work With You to Deliver a Process-Based Lead-Management Approach

We know that in the past we have taken a very “top of the funnel” (i.e. lead generation) approach to our marketing. We know that when “leads” came into the funnel, all we did was dump them on you, so you could follow up and sell. We then went back to our PowerPoint presentations, so we could tell management about all the leads we generated.

But now, in listening to you, we have realized that what we generated were not really “leads.” They were more like “responses.” To correct this, we promise to develop, in collaboration with you, a lead-management approach so that you receive only the best quality leads. This process will ensure that all leads are managed through the buying process. By marketing this way, we hope to help you increase the conversion rates on the leads you will receive, which will ultimately increase your sales numbers.

In addition, as part of this process, we will work to ensure the integrity of our marketing and sales data. We will ask you to help us plan our quota (i.e. the amount of revenue for which marketing will be responsible, and the number of leads it will take to get there). We will ask you to help us build a lead-qualification framework. We will ask for your help in developing nurture strategies that help push deals through the pipeline in a more timely fashion. We need your help to build this lead-management framework effectively.

We Will Become Coin-Operated

We confess that when we are in our marketing meetings, we often talk about sales being “coin-operated” as if it’s some kind of disease.  We understand that coin-operated (i.e. having a revenue creation mindset) is a healthy way to look at our business. Please forgive us for the derision. Going forward, you can consider us coin-operated marketers. We will look at our marketing success in terms of the number of leads you accept from us and how many of those leads contribute to revenue. We will deliver reports that show the revenue we have helped create through our campaigns. We look forward to helping you create more revenue for our company. We will need your help in this area as we are not accustomed to working this way. As part of our commitment, we will make our marketers compensation tied to revenue, just like you. In doing so we will share the burden with you and be more aligned towards a common goal.

We Will Market by the Numbers

We will no longer market by activity-driven pressures. We will not attend events, send emails, buy online ads or run social campaigns simply because it is “what we have always done” or because “we have money in the budget to do so.” Instead, we will measure our campaigns based on their contribution to revenue. We will then continue to run those campaigns which contribute to revenue, and do away with those that do not. We will use business intelligence that we derive from both marketing and sales metrics to help us plan for the future. (We’ll need you to share your metrics with us.)

We Will Be Accountable and View You as Our Customer

We will no longer point the finger at sales, blaming you for “not getting it” or suggesting that more diligent follow up on leads by you will solve our problems. We will be open with you, sharing our failures. We will learn from them and seek to improve. We will also share our successes with you. Together, we’ll show management how we’ve created more revenue for our organizations. We won’t hide behind insignificant data such as “opens” and “clicks.” We’ll focus on numbers such as lead to sale conversions and marketing pipeline contribution.  Based on metrics from the past, we’ll commit to goals and objectives and do our best to meet them. You have a quota, and now, we’ll have one as well. We’ll ask you for continued feedback and input.

We hope you can see our earnestness in what we’ve written here, and that, together, we can begin anew. Our prospects and customers are tired of us bickering and pointing the finger at each other. They want us to deliver value, provide relevant content, and address their pressing needs. I’m confident we can do so together.

We look forward to a long lasting and fruitful relationship!

Sincerely,
B2B marketers everywhere

1. Wrestling in the Office. Sales and marketing settle their differences like cro-magnon men or women.
2. Rental Lists as Leads. Marketing refers to accounts and contacts on rental lists as ‘leads’. Any marketer who indiscriminately parrots this term from list vendors should be sent back to B2B marketing school.
3. Inquiries as Leads. Marketing categorizes an inquiry as a ‘lead’. A responder is just that: someone who is interested in your offer and may not be evaluating solutions.
4. Multiple Definitions for a Lead. Marketing and sales can’t agree on a single definition of a qualified, sales-ready lead.
5. Recycling Marketing Messaging for Sales. Dragging-and-dropping a message from a marketing brochure or website does not satisfy the needs of inside and outside sales for precise, distinct and succinct messaging.
6. No commitment from Sales on Lead Handling. Once marketing hands off a lead to sales there is no agreed upon course of action for lead engagement, lead reporting or lead recycling.
7. Fuzzy Sales Lead Feedback. The reports from sales are full of emotion but not facts. Leads are tossed aside with little detailed feedback as to why the lead did not meet the lead criteria.
8. A Qualified Prospect Calls Back. A lead who is expecting a call from sales, never receives contact. The lead re-contacts your organization to find out when someone will call.
9. Leads Generated by Marketing are Not Factored into Quota. Sales does not count on marketing-sourced leads to achieve their quota.
10. Marketing is Measured on Inquiries or Responses. Marketing is measured on activity metrics, rather than results metrics.

What signs do you see that cause you concern about sales and marketing alignment? What would you add to the list?