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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A smart, practical guide to rocket-powered business growth Aligned to Achieve puts sales and marketing on the same page, creating a revenue 'dream team' that will drive your organization to new heights. Smart, practical explanations, case studies, and tips guide you toward action over theory, and dozens of examples illustrate the tangible effects of these changes in action at business-to-business companies. Written by sales and marketing executives who have made alignment work, this book is directed toward practitioners and leaders seeking to crack the code of sales and marketing alignment. Contributions by industry thought leaders and B2B executives provide fresh perspective and nuanced direction, while thoughtful, strategic, and well-supported guidance throughout helps you remove the obstacles standing in the way of your organization's financial and strategic goals. Misalignment between sales and marketing is an age-old problem--frequently lamented, but seldom addressed. As this schism grows amidst the evolving marketplace, its effects on top and bottom line performance are being felt more than ever before. This book shows you how to bring sales and marketing together effectively once and for all, leveraging their strengths to build an unstoppable force for growth. * Understand the cost of misalignment and the driving forces behind it * Learn strategies for improving your culture, process, leadership, and technology to initiate and support alignment * Identify the best places to modify your sales and marketing programs to kickstart collaboration and cooperation between your teams * Discover how other companies are uniting their sales and marketing teams into a single force for growth * Walk away with practical advice on how to apply recommendation in the real world Misalignment is frustrating for everyone in sales, marketing, and leadership. It's also detrimental to your organization's performance--but the problem is not insurmountable. In fact, most of the obstacles it creates are self-inflicted, and entirely within control of leadership. Aligned to Achieve helps you identify and remove those obstacles, and build a culture of sustainable growth.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1: Why Align?
Misalignment Stalls Your Path to Growth
Misalignment Leads to Mistrust and Hostility
Here's What We've Seen—and Why We're Devoted to Changing It
Misalignment Is Getting Worse and Here's Why
What It Takes to Align
What to Expect from This Book
Chapter 2: Get Those Cultural Obstacles out of Your Way
Alignment Must Be a CEO-Driven Initiative
Recognize Your Differences as You Build Your Alignment Strategy
Get Ready for These Common Objections to Alignment
Translating Culture into Growth-Driving Behaviors
Chapter 3: Build Alignment into Every Process
Process Is Where Your Culture Hits the Road (It's a Bumpy One)
Creating Your Customer Engagement Strategy
Alignment Process Fundamentals
Don't Just Change Processes, Rebuild Them to Support Alignment
Chapter 4: An Aligned Organization Requires a Different Kind of Leader
Is Alignment Obvious or Is It a Stretch Goal?
Attributes of an Aligned Leader
What Makes a Good Leader in an Aligned Organization?
Chapter 5: Data Is the Great Equalizer of Alignment
More Data from More Sources
Data Is the Currency of Growth
Determining Data's Value
Maintaining Your Data's Health
Data's Role Across the Customer Journey
Data Is the Great Equalizer
Chapter 6: Push Alignment Beyond Sales and Marketing and into the CIO's Office
Technology Is Shifting Faster than You
View Technology as a Tool, Not a Silver Bullet
Technology Should Support Your Data Strategy
Keep Your Eye on Alignment
Building an Alignment-Optimized Tech Stack
Getting Your Budget in Order
Remember that Technology Should Enable, Not Detract
Where IT Fits in an Aligned Organization
Collusion Is Such a Dirty Word, but It Works
Chapter 7: Cracking the Code of Alignment
Uncovering the Roots of Misalignment
Challenges to Alignment
What Separates Alignment Leaders and Laggards
At Least We Can All Be Friends
Chapter 8: Leading-Edge Concepts for Reaching Complete Alignment
Prepare for What's Next
Prediction #1—The Rise of the Consultative Seller
Prediction #2—Millennials Have a Major Impact
Prediction #3—Cross-Training Becomes Imperative
Prediction #4—Academia Catches Up
Prediction #5—Marketing Compensation Gets Tied to Pipeline
Prediction #6—Account-Based Everything Becomes a Top Priority
Prediction #7—Customer Data Strategy Rises in Importance
Expect Alignment to Continue Its Expansion
Prepare Your Team for Tomorrow, but Start Cheering Them on Today
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.2
Figure 1.3
Figure 1.4
Figure 2.1
Figure 2.2
Figure 3.1
Figure 3.2
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Figure 3.6
Figure 5.1
Figure 5.2
Figure 5.3
Figure 5.4
Figure 6.1
Figure 6.2
Figure 6.3
Figure 7.1
Figure 7.2
Figure 7.3
Figure 7.4
Figure 7.5
Figure 8.1
Figure 8.2
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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How to Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth
Aligned to Achieve
Tracy Eiler
Andrea Austin
Cover design: Michael J. Freeland
Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030,(201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:.
Names: Eiler, Tracy, author. | Austin, Andrea, author.
Title: Aligned to achieve : how to unite your sales and marketing teams into a single force for growth / Tracy Eiler, Andrea Austin.
Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2016. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031021 (print) | LCCN 2016035377 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119291756 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119291794 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119291770 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Marketing. | Selling. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Marketing / General.
Classification: LCC HF5415 .E445 2016 (print) | LCC HF5415 (ebook) | DDC 658.3/044–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031021
Dedication
To my parents, Bob and Jean, who nurtured my passion for living and learning.
—Andrea
In honor of my mom, Sandy Eiler, who taught me how to be someone who makes things happen.
—Tracy
Foreword
Alignment should be the number-one operational issue for every business-to-business company. The era of fostering tension between sales and marketing is over. Businesses achieve more success and operate at a higher level—meaning more growth, more profits, and more productivity—when the teams interacting with the customer are tightly aligned. That extends from alignment on defining who the customer is, to what the customer sees and hears, to how that customer is approached, engaged with, and ultimately won.
We are in the midst of a long and unprecedented period of rapid, technology-fueled business transformation. Markets have become more competitive, products more commoditized, new business channels and methods are appearing, and technology has become ubiquitous and affordable by even the smallest companies. What that means is any company of any size can effectively compete against rivals and everyone has a harder time standing out from the growing noise in every market. Even more, buyers and buying cycles have transformed because buyers have more power and more information, which enables them to be independent of, disconnected from, and less reliant on you as a seller.
All of this has led us to today, where B2B businesses are fundamentally challenged in their go-to-market efforts. Noise in the market has skyrocketed, confusion abounds, differentiation is elusive, and buyer attention is a limited resource.
So what's a company to do?
Leaders must align their teams to focus on company growth, not departmental success. Gone are the days when sales could focus only on closing deals, marketing could focus only on generating leads, and every other department could look at their own achievements. When teams are aligned and aimed at common goals, they work better together and they win more often. But alignment is not just necessary for growth, it is necessary for survival because buyers are no longer responding to traditional and disjointed outreaches. Instead, companies must coordinate across all touchpoints where buyers are engaged, regardless of who initiates that contact or how. Buyers do not see sales and marketing; they see your brand and your company, your website and your booth at a show. Alignment enables a thoughtful, coordinated engagement with customers, and they will respond favorably.
Alignment is required, but it is not enough. It needs to be guided by a go-to-market strategy. I am starting to see a clear trend among leading companies of adopting a modern and tech-centric approach to market targeting. These companies—brands you would recognize as the most forward-thinking and innovative companies in their segments—shy away from the traditional volume approaches of outbound calls and emails. Instead they aim for quality and pinpoint targeting with the right outreach to the right person at the right time. They have learned that the old model of spray-and-pray is no longer working, so they have adopted a more focused and strategic approach.
These companies have teams that are aligned and focused, a strategic go-to-market plan, and the technologies and processes in place to execute it. As a result, they are outperforming their competitors and pulling way ahead of the others in the market. They have turned their strategy, processes, technologies, and teams into a defensible, competitive advantage for their company. It is a great time to be marketing and sales leaders, and to have the opportunity to shape the future of our companies and their revenue engines. It is also a great time to be a CEO. What is possible today wasn't even imaginable just a few years ago.
To be aligned requires leadership, and leadership begins with the CEO. It does not stop until you reach everyone in your organization. Regardless of where you fit in your company and whom you lead (even if it is just yourself), this book gives you a set of recipes that will help you break down walls, align your organization, and ensure it is ready for the challenges of going to market in this ever-evolving, complex, and challenging time. No one team can do it alone.
—Umberto MillettiFounder and CEO, InsideView
Aligned to Achieve
Chapter 1Why Align?
What are the topics of conversation around your office? That most likely depends on whom you talk to.
From sales reps, you probably hear complaints about low-quality leads or those that take too much nurturing to move through the sales funnel. They likely also complain that the marketing department's content does not work or is not granular enough for the specific targets, situations, or markets the sales team encounters. For example, maybe your sales reps come back from an event griping that a competitor's booth was larger, had more of a crowd, or looked better. Maybe they argue that the organization's marketing message isn't differentiated or compelling enough for them to turn opportunities into action, or that marketing is simply out of touch with the customer's needs. Your sales reps might even wonder out loud why the organization is focused on one market instead of targeting the obvious opportunity in another market.
When you talk with marketers, you probably hear their dismay that the sales department doesn't appreciate the volume of leads marketing generates and that they are too slow to follow up on hot prospects. Your marketers might mention that the content they're creating isn't being used at the right times, or at all. Maybe they express their frustration with sales reps who are too aggressive in meetings or who get preferential treatment for hitting their numbers. Maybe marketers complain there's never enough budgeted for them to keep up with competitors. Perhaps they talk about being frustrated by not having time to create the never-ending stream of content requested by sales, or to get out in the field to visit customers and really research the market.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Think about what you're hearing from other teams within your company, or worse, from your CEO. Have they commented about the high turnover of sales reps, the missed sales forecasts, the recent loss of a major opportunity, budgets that aren't covering what's needed to win, complaints from customers, or competitors who seem to close bigger deals or have more marketing impact?
There is likely a lot of truth behind all of these complaints and the common cause is sales and marketing misalignment. The consequences of this can be dire.
Misalignment Stalls Your Path to Growth
Misalignment between sales and marketing is holding back the growth of your company—and your career.
Think about the last opportunity your organization lost and how different departments could be considered accountable. Maybe the salespeople couldn't find the content they needed, couldn't quite get the value proposition right, or couldn't articulate exactly why the customer should buy from you instead of your competitor. Marketing may not have warmed up the prospect with relevant campaigns, or may have issues with lead processing leading to lack of timely follow-up. Critical definitions and handoff points may be full of friction.
Now think about how these issues and others combine to prevent your organization from closing more business. All of those barriers to growth are caused by misalignment. According to SiriusDecisions, misalignment is to blame for companies' missing out on 19 percent faster revenue growth and 15 percent higher profitability, as shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Aligned teams are higher-performing according to SiriusDecisions, who found that more aligned companies have significant strategic advantages over their competition.
Source: SiriusDecisions
Misalignment Leads to Mistrust and Hostility
Misalignment is rooted in the differences between how sales and marketing work, what it takes to be good at each, and how each department's success is measured. Marketers look at the big picture of markets and campaigns, while sales focuses on one deal at a time. Good sales reps are driven and aggressive, while good marketers are creative and analytical. Marketing success is based on awareness, impact, and quantities, while sales performance is measured by quota attainment.
In most organizations, sales drives revenue and marketing drives lead generation and awareness. Marketing looks at win rates and conversion rates across the sales funnel, takes the revenue target for the next quarter, and calculates how many leads are required for sales to hit their number. Sales uses the leads and content that marketing gives them and tries to close as many sales as possible.
The two departments are inherently different—from how they are compensated to how they are educated—and that's good, but it can also make it hard for sales and marketing to work together. The two teams are frequently at odds over issues as small as how to score an individual lead or as large as which markets to target. That results in mistrust, avoidance, and outright hostility between the groups, some of which is even enabled by misguided CEOs.
Get It Right: Take Those First Steps Toward Alignment
Christelle Flahaux has been a pioneer in using data to bridge marketing and sales in her senior-level roles at MapR Technologies, Jive Software, Marketo, Taleo, and Ariba. Christelle's most recent role was to sit between sales and marketing and use data to bring them into alignment. What it takes, according to Christelle, is working together and relying on data to build agreement.
“In a previous company, I discovered early on the job that our lead scoring wasn't effective,” Christelle explained. “Marketing thought we were doing great because we were delivering leads that scored well, but sales complained the leads were junk. It took us a while to figure out how to do it right so we weren't delivering 20,000 marginal leads, we were delivering 3,000 good ones.”
It was more than just a revamp of the lead-scoring methodology. Instead, it started a deeper conversation between marketing and sales to discover what was really important.
“We walked the sales team through our scoring methodology and discussed each and every point,” Christelle continued. “What firmographic information is important? Should a tradeshow lead get more points? No. Should a white paper download get more points? Maybe. Walking through the logic helped to flesh out the thought behind it and make it transparent. It really built trust between the teams.”
As they figured out the appropriate lead-scoring models, it led to more conversations and more collaboration on different items, all of which brought the teams closer to alignment.
“Eventually we talked instead of getting angry at each other,” she continued. “Marketing can ask for more budget to get more leads to help sales meet their number, or we can jointly figure out how to increase close rates so sales can hire more reps. We ended up being a joint team figuring out how to meet the overall goals together.”
Not getting angry at each other doesn't mean not having disagreements, however. Christelle relies on data as the key to finding a solution and avoiding lingering issues.
“If you're upset, you tend to make blanket statements, like ‘We don't have any leads,’” she added. “When we rely on data, we can turn it into a fact-based conversation. We can both see exactly what's happening. Data takes the emotion out of it. It keeps you from getting defensive, especially if you approach it [by saying], ‘Let's both sit down and look at the data.’ It also helps you figure out what the true issues are and points you in the right direction to fix them.”
Here's What We've Seen—and Why We're Devoted to Changing It
We've each been in leadership roles for more than 20 years, and we've seen our share of aligned and misaligned sales and marketing teams. We've worked under CEOs who understand the value of alignment and build a culture that fosters communication and collaboration, and we've worked under CEOs who encourage hostility between the teams, thinking that more tension yields better performance. We've also each worked with good and bad counterparts, and have learned that alignment takes commitment and work from both teams, especially their leadership.
Tracy experienced blatant misalignment firsthand when, as a newly hired SVP of marketing, she was introduced to her executive sales counterparts and they wouldn't even shake her hand. Their behavior was rude, obviously, but after watching a revolving door of marketing leaders come and go, their reasoning was sound: “You won't be around long, so why bother getting to know you?”
Andrea, as VP of sales, reached her misalignment breaking point while working with a counterpart in marketing who agreed again and again to help her out, but eventually did only what he wanted to do. When she encouraged him to work together with her on messaging improvements, he said they were just going to have to agree to disagree. What? Does that seem like reasonable progress towards alignment? No. Instead, it created a situation where marketing could take the blame if his messaging didn't work, but where he could say, “I told you so” if it did work. Andrea went about her business and found ways to work around marketing instead of with marketing. This undoubtedly took a toll on the company's performance, including revenue.
We've also both been exposed to the temperamental sales VPs who throw marketing under the bus every chance they get, and who always demand their way because they control the revenue. Similarly, we've all seen a weak CMO who thinks that branding is the only thing that is important. Or is myopically focused on lead-generation volumes and ignores the quality, messaging, and win rates.
Through it all, we've come to the obvious conclusion that aligned sales and marketing teams are more powerful and more productive, and create a more valuable company. Alignment also creates a more enjoyable workplace, one where marketing is challenged to perform at its best, where sales become easier, and where the entire company is aligned around one thing: growth. But alignment is hard. It's easier to live with the status quo, in the short term at least. We argue that, as a leader, you can't wait any longer. Here's why.
B2B Sales Has Changed Dramatically
Sales is difficult. First, salespeople travel—a lot. Hotels are their weekday homes, the club level is their dining room, and flight attendants know them by name.
Second, they are constantly rejected. It's not uncommon for people to hang up the phone before salespeople can get through the first sentence; that is, if anyone takes the call at all. Sales reps know that people rarely respond to their voicemails and emails. They've learned not to take it personally.
Finally, the pressure on salespeople is enormous. They're one missed quota away from unemployment. They're also responsible when a deal is lost. But this also means they can never give up; they must draw on their reserves of tenacity and resilience to try again and again. That's what has always made a good salesperson.
Until very recently, there were also some perks. Being in sales meant access to expense accounts, steak dinners, and golf outings because wining and dining was the way to win deals. Relationships trumped almost everything else and relationship building was the key to winning business.
How deals are closed today, however, is much different. Sales reps are no longer trusted advisors who are there from the beginning of the purchasing process. Thanks to the amount of information available online, prospects have more control. They do their research and consider options before sales is ever directly involved. As a result, a salesperson's role is less about building relationships and more about providing information when asked, challenging a prospect's objections, and earning the right to become an advisor.
Technology has given customers the ability to know as much about our company, our offerings, and our competitors as we do. Products are more disposable. Services are more interchangeable. Customers no longer take our word for it, and everything we say in our pitch is verified or discounted within minutes.
On the inside, each sales rep is now responsible for many more deals. Everything they do is tracked by managers and rolled up into forecasts. Promotions and demotions, opportunities and targets, are all based on the data, the metrics a company uses to evaluate sales performance.
On the outside, competitors have an easier time looking more successful or bigger than they truly are. They can see where you've been, where you're heading, or who you're connected to. Launching a competing offering is as easy as creating a new webpage.
In other words, sales is hard and it's getting harder. Salespeople need help—and that can come from an alignment with marketing.
B2B Marketing Has Changed Dramatically
Marketers are responsible for providing customers with the answers to the questions: Why do anything at all? Why now? And why this company? Marketing has to create awareness campaigns and messages that are broadly appealing yet still differentiated, and they need every customer to feel unique and special.
Until very recently, marketing was a creative role driven by gut feelings. Marketers designed advertisements, wrote brochure copy, and decided if the company logo should be printed on pens or coffee mugs. They planned events at luxury locations with big budgets. And it was easy to pump unqualified leads into the funnel simply by running another campaign.
How marketing works today, however, is much different. Data trumps gut feelings. Marketers send tens of thousands of emails in an instant, knowing only a few dozen will be opened. Pumping more leads into the pipeline doesn't matter if the lead quality is poor. Securing solid leads requires an understanding of keywords, social media, and streaming mobile video platforms.
On the inside, marketers are driven by data. They look at conversion rates and web referrals and followers and shares. They scrutinize analytics, reports, dashboards, pie charts, and traffic estimates. When they have time, they worry about the new social media sites a company does not use and the blogs where it wasn't mentioned.
On the outside, marketers find it harder to compete. Their voice is lost in a sea of noise. Bigger budgets aren't the answer to besting competitors who go viral. Existing budgets are spread across more channels and more technology, and competitors are younger, faster, and know more about us than ever before.
What remains true is that marketing exists to make sales easier. Again, it's a question of alignment.
Your Customer Has More Power and Information than You
As mentioned before, customers have become increasingly powerful. Business-to-business (B2B) sales is now, as they say, a buyer's market. For example, consider when you purchased your last car. You probably built it online first, looked at customer reviews of the model and dealerships, read articles on quality and performance, and found the dealer's invoice price so you knew exactly how much to pay. And you did all that before you even left your house.
What we've come to expect in consumer shopping—nearly complete transparency—is what we're now expecting in business transactions as well. The entire Internet is at our disposal, making it easy to find company and product reviews, scrutiny from professional bloggers and analysts, recommendations from other customers, insights from news and social media, and more. A company website provides potential customers with only a sliver of the information they can find with their own research.
There is so much readily available content that, according to CEB, an executive advisory company, nearly 60 percent of the buying process is complete before a sales rep ever gets involved. What's more, as shown in Figure 1.2, up to a third of customers in certain types of purchases would prefer not to interact with a sales rep at all. Salespeople and marketers once relied on becoming trusted advisors to their customers, but they're being quickly replaced by websites, blogs, and tweets.
Figure 1.2 Forrester Research found that, while B2B buyers are doing far more self-guided research than ever before, they still choose to work with sales reps as purchases become more complex.
Source: Forrester Research, Inc., “Death Of A (B2B) Salesman,” April, 2015.
This pivotal shift in B2B commerce has profoundly changed how sales and marketing teams must perform their craft. The old ways of selling and marketing are quickly becoming obsolete. Sales happens less often on the golf course and more in a web meeting. Marketing has less punch on a billboard and more through a tweet.
This shift is also disrupting the relationship between internal sales and marketing divisions. Marketers have to think more like sales reps, and reps have to think more like marketers. Marketing can add a “buy now” button to a website as easily and quickly as a sales rep can send a message to thousands of opportunities.
Despite this, the customer's increased ability to find information represents the critical rallying point around which sales and marketing must align. Recognizing that the customer has more power and information than ever is the first step. Sales and marketing uniting to deal with this new reality in the B2B world is the next step. This means working smarter and working together. To win, sales and marketing have to be tightly aligned in how they work, how they communicate, how they manage customers, and how they drive growth.
Misalignment Means Misunderstanding
Our marketing team at InsideView conducted an alignment survey of 1,000 B2B sales and marketing professionals (we'll dive deeper into our findings in Chapter 7). We found that neither sales nor marketing really understand what the other does.
Sales perceives marketing as being full of people who spend too much time on branding and events, trying to attract lots of eyeballs without much consideration for how they translate into revenue. Most sales reps assume that this leaves marketers out of touch with the real needs of customers.
In a year, marketing talks to only a fraction of the customers that sales talks to every day, so sales resents marketing's claim to truly know the industry and have accurate customer personas. Worse yet, marketing provides sales with their leads, but they aren't responsible for, nor measured on, pipeline or closed deals.
When marketing looks at sales, they see a bunch of mavericks driven only by quota. A marketer's perception of successful reps is that they can do whatever they want, go weeks without entering information into their customer relationship management (CRM) or other systems, and spend lavishly on expense accounts. Often, marketing thinks sales are coin-operated wheeler-dealers who are driven to find easy opportunities to put money in their pockets.
The presumptions on both sides are wrong, which becomes instantly clear if we look at how each team is measured. In our survey, we found that sales is frequently measured on much more than quota attainment. They have goals for new accounts, renewals, and upsells. We also found that two-thirds of marketers are measured on pipeline, and more than half are measured on lead quality.
What's apparent here is that sales and marketing are made of strikingly different personalities who continue to misunderstand each other's real roles, which are closely intertwined. But miscommunication and misperceptions don't tell the whole story. In fact, they merely scratch the surface and point to deeper, systemic issues within both teams and within most companies—and the problems are getting worse.
Get It Right: Ask Questions that Can Only Be Answered by Aligned Sales and Marketing Teams
Elisabeth Hawkins is the director of demand generation and marketing operations at PagerDuty, an operations performance platform designed to make businesses more reliable. It's a unique role that wouldn't have been thinkable just a few years ago, and it puts Elisabeth at the nexus of sales and marketing alignment. This was especially true as her company transitioned to seeking a new type of customer.
“PagerDuty was focused on smaller companies but wanted to expand to larger enterprise customers,” Elisabeth explained. “It totally changed how we went to market and how our sales teams interacted with customers. We went from relying on free trials as a lead generator to working with large purchasing teams that required different content, presence at events, and complex programs that we didn't have before.”
That fundamental shift in target customer brought many of their misalignment issues to the forefront, and also made it clear that sales and marketing would need to work together if PagerDuty was going to succeed. A key decision to drive alignment was to have marketing take responsibility for revenue, not just leads.
“The strategic change in customer exacerbated all of our existing challenges,” Elisabeth said. “We quickly saw that alignment was critical if we were going to scale. We also saw that marketing should be held to 100 percent of the revenue goal. Every lead encounters some sort of marketing along the way. Sales might have initiated the deal, but they'll get an email or look at some collateral eventually. Now that marketing has responsibility for revenue, they are taken more seriously by sales. It makes marketing more relevant in the eyes of the sales reps.”
Once alignment started happening, it became easier for sales and marketing to quickly move beyond blame when a roadblock appeared and jump right to a discussion of solutions. Like others, including us at InsideView, lead scoring became an instant focal point.
“We wanted to get back to the basics,” Elisabeth added. “We wanted a lead scoring model that everyone could understand and explain. It's also the first critical handoff between sales and marketing, so it's a great place to start working on alignment. Then it's easier to start looking at the other handoff points and hold each other accountable.”
As Elisabeth and her colleagues became more aligned, data became the next obvious focus.
“We started to ask ourselves about the minimum amount of data we needed to achieve our goals,” she continued. “Did we need a lead's industry and number of employees? If so, where was it going to come from? Should we automate it with a service or rely on sales to research it? These were questions that both sales and marketing had to agree upon since we were going to be heavily relying on that data. But then we started thinking about targeting, and we knew based on experience that a great lead for us was a company who was ‘tech forward.’ You can't just buy that data. It's not a typical attribute you enter into a lead form.”
Since the teams at PagerDuty were already well aligned by this point, it was easier to work together with the common goal of growing the business.
