Does it feel like your sales and marketing departments are out of sync?
Today’s the day you eliminate the invisible barrier between the two and put the strategies and shared goals in place to ensure that your entire company is rowing in the same direction.
In this episode, I talk with Lynne Capozzi, the CMO at Acquia, about how to drive alignment between sales and marketing.
What we talked about:
- Misalignment between sales and marketing
- Inviting product to the revenue kickoff
- Investigating the impact of self-serve options and community led-growth
- Revenue trends
Sales & Marketing Misalignment
The first thing you need to do if you’re sensing a misalignment between your sales and marketing team is to understand the root causes of that misalignment.
More often than not, the cause of misalignment is a disconnect between sales and marketing, and their understanding of objectives.
Maybe the partnership just hasn’t been formed, and there’s a line of division in what sales does and what marketing does, rather than an agreed on set of deliverables to accomplish together.
Driving Alignment
How do you get in the trenches and drive alignment between sales and marketing?
For Lynne and her team, they took the old way of doing things and blew them up.
Now it’s a partnership. It’s inbound and outbound together. It doesn’t matter whether a lead is a sales lead or a marketing lead. It’s just a lead.
Beyond that, gone are the days of the “sales kickoff” every year. It’s now a sales and marketing kickoff. It’s not just sales because especially in the regions around the world, field marketers are working closely with their sales counterparts.
So they have one meeting, where everybody gets the same vision and mission and message.
Including the Product Team
Beyond just alignment between sales and marketing, we can’t forget the product team.
In Lynne’s world, the product organizations are now coming in to hear what the sales and marketing teams are being exposed to.
What are their missions? What are the revenue goals that they’re driving? How will those goals and commitments directly, or indirectly, impact the product teams?
At the end of the day, the folks who build the products should have just as much a seat at the table as the ones who sell and market the product. Because the name of the game is alignment.
And it’s hard to get teams aligned when they’re not all at the same table.
Get in touch with Lynne on LinkedIn.
For more engaging sales conversations, subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or on our website.
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