Why do teammates fight? You may think it’s different for every team, but most of the fracases likely boil down to one simple concept: power.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, researchers from Standford Business School, the Booth School of Business and the Melbourne Business School conducted studies that found that when a high-powered individual works with team members they consider a threat, they tend to lash out against their team and, as a result, create a less effective work environment.
In short, being powerful creates problems. But there’s a remedy to dealing with the power-hungry — and it starts with alignment. The researchers found that when there’s clear communication, shared decision-making and a culture of respect, teams are less likely to experience conflict.
The same dynamic can explain the oft-tumultuous relationship that is often borne out of sales and marketing teams. Yet in conversations with four marketing and sales leaders in Colorado, Built In found that harmony between these two teams also starts with functional alignment.
“At the end of the day, sales and marketing teams are trying to do the same thing: make the business as successful as possible,” Erin Doherty, director of marketing at Four Winds Interactive, said.
Though the ways of getting aligned vary for each leader, each spoke to how they’ve been able to create more effective relationships on their team.
“You just might find your salespeople and marketing people have a blast collaborating,” Brad Kemp, VP of Sales at Verblio, said.
What they do: Druva delivers data protection and management for the cloud era. Their cloud platform is built on AWS and offered as a service, delivering globally accessible, scalable and completely autonomous enterprise data resiliency.
In your experience, what are the main causes for misalignment between sales and marketing teams?
One of the core reasons many sales and marketing organizations are misaligned is the absence of shared goals, objectives and responsibilities. Therefore, it is critical for sales and marketing leaders to collaborate and develop shared KPIs across the entire funnel.
At Druva, we have an ongoing interlock process between sales and marketing leadership to ensure shared goals are established and clearly cascaded across the organization, and the progress against these goals is tracked on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. For example, our marketing team is not simply measured on our ability to deliver marketing qualified leads (MQLs), but the goals extend all the way to delivering against pipeline and revenue targets.
How do you create a common set of metrics to measure success that is understandable to both teams?
One of Druva’s five core values is “one team.” As one team, our sales and marketing organizations have shared metrics that are based on a full-funnel, lead-to-revenue approach where measurements are inserted across all phases of the sales funnel. These goals are transparent and shared broadly across the organization in various all-hands meetings and made available via a shared reporting tool. Our data-driven approach provides visibility to where goals are met or exceeded and where there are gaps. This enables the team to focus and double-down on efforts for increased success, as well as identify fixes to fill in gaps.
It is critical for sales and marketing leaders to collaborate and develop shared KPIs across the entire funnel.”
What’s the best way to maintain alignment between sales and marketing teams in the long term?
Sales and marketing alignment requires ongoing collaboration across teams. I meet regularly with our CRO and the sales leadership team to discuss how our two teams can work better together, and I also ask my team to build marketing programs with cross-functional input before executing. In particular, I have found success in developing “connected campaigns” where sales and marketing teams jointly collaborate on go-to-market programs that are designed specifically to help the sales team meet their revenue goals. These connected campaigns start with shared goals and deliver against fully aligned messaging and content across multiple touchpoints along the buyer’s journey.
What they do: Four Winds Interactive provides digital signage services for a variety of establishments like airports, arenas, banks, hotels and more.
In your experience, what are the main causes for misalignment between sales and marketing teams?
From the marketing side, you have to be working toward — and consistently reporting on – measurable goals that are impactful to the sales team. In my role, I have to be able to produce quality leads that are going to help fill the sales funnel — any campaigns I run need to align with the specific goals that the sales team is working toward. If marketing or sales is working in a silo and doesn’t consistently communicate with the other as far as what goals are important, then misalignment will easily happen.
How do you create a common set of metrics to measure success, that is understandable to both teams?
Creating a common set of metrics has to be a joint exercise. A huge part of alignment between sales and marketing is understanding the goals of each department and how each team is driving the outcome. Sales and marketing need to be speaking the same language when it comes to metrics or else you’ll find an inaccurate view of campaign effectiveness, lead flow and pipeline creation. I meet regularly with our sales leaders to ensure that we are all speaking the same language and are measuring the same things. It also helps to have insight into lead flow, and be in the discussions about any potential changes to lead flow or reporting processes.
The more we talk and the more check-ins we have, the easier it is to maintain the alignment we all need.”
What’s the best way to maintain alignment between sales and marketing teams in the long term?
At the end of the day, sales and marketing teams are trying to do the same thing: make the business as successful as possible. That said, I think maintaining alignment boils down to a few simple things: agreeing on goals, being agile and building great relationships. In my experience, sales and marketing need to work hand in hand toward their respective goals and be open about progress. The campaigns that marketing runs directly influence the sales funnel, so marketing needs to know where to focus their efforts to find the best quality leads for sales. Sales need to communicate with marketing when priorities shift and targeting needs to be tweaked for marketing to be agile and adjust campaigns quickly and effectively.
What I’ve found in my role at FWI is that building solid relationships with sales has created an open door for communication between the teams and has allowed us to be more successful as a combined team. The more we talk and the more check-ins we have, the easier it is to maintain the alignment we all need. It’s really simple — open, ongoing communication and relationships are the foundation for long-term alignment.
What they do: IntelePeer provides users with a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) to improve their customer experience. The CPaaS includes voice messaging, APIs and workflow automation.
In your experience, what are the main causes for misalignment between sales and marketing teams?
Throughout my career, I’ve noticed that the main causes for misalignment between sales and marketing teams stem from a lack of communication. This can lead to disagreements on the ideal target customer and unshared metrics or KPIs, which can result in disjointed efforts. If teams were to collaborate and align these details and processes, sales and marketing could become a streamlined powerhouse to increase the quantity and quality of leads.
Completely uniting the teams will ensure sales and marketing teams aren’t disjointed and ineffective in their strategies.”
How do you create a common set of metrics to measure success, that is understandable to both teams?
Unsurprisingly, sales teams usually measure their success on figures such as new accounts, deals closed, contract renewals, etc., while marketing teams analyze their performance by lead quantity and quality, website traffic and overall brand awareness. One way to tackle this discrepancy in metrics is more transparency and frequent review of new customer leads, which will enable more visibility into the customer journey and help to eliminate competition between teams. Overall, recurrent conversations on more generalized KPIs, such as revenue growth, can help to improve the customer acquisition pipeline for a company in any industry.
What’s the best way to maintain alignment between sales and marketing teams in the long term?
The best way to maintain alignment between sales and marketing teams in the long term is to have consistent conversations on organizational trajectory, goals, objectives, campaigns and results. Taking it one step further, completely uniting the teams will ensure sales and marketing teams aren’t disjointed and ineffective in their strategies.
What they do: Verblio is a multimedia content creation platform.
In your experience, what are the main causes for misalignment between sales and marketing teams?
Sales and marketing misalignment is often caused by team and individual goals that incentivize short-term thinking. When each group is focused on hitting their number, whether that’s around monthly sales quotas, page views, inbound leads or some other metric, it’s easy to lose sight of how a united sales and marketing strategy is the most effective way to increase revenue. But when both groups rally around a common revenue goal and apply their respective talents to hitting their number as a team — like athletes playing different positions but acting as a single unit — silos break down pretty quickly.
Alignment between sales and marketing starts at the top.”
How do you create a common set of metrics to measure success, that is understandable to both teams?
Revenue growth is a pretty easy-to-understand metric. The challenge is attribution from each action or milestone assigned to sales and marketing to that revenue. Once each team member can draw a direct line from their work to that exciting new client or big contract renewal, establishing common metrics becomes a no-brainer. And, making decisions around where to invest or allocate resources is much more straightforward.
Getting comfortable with less-than-perfect attribution also goes a long way here. We want to be able to measure everything and should certainly strive for good data, but waiting for perfect instead of making the best decisions you can with the data you have can also contribute to misalignment between teams.
What’s the best way to maintain alignment between sales and marketing teams in the long term?
Alignment between sales and marketing starts at the top. Hire leaders that see the big picture and encourage them to create a culture around one unit focused on revenue growth. Then, keep an open dialogue between the teams — shared meetings are a must — and leverage smaller, cross-functional groups to drive specific initiatives forward. Instead of thinking “web copy is marketing’s job” or “closing new deals is for sales,” objectively identify where you can get better and get the right people involved in making it happen.
You just might find your salespeople and marketing people have a blast collaborating — we sure have at Verblio. Our copywriter meets with each member of the sales team regularly, hilarity ensues, and we get better results.
