There’s a reason why talking about B2B marketing and sales team alignment is all the rage. It’s the basis of so many important and emergent B2B marketing and sales trends to move from lead gen to demand gen, the shift to Rev Ops from siloed ops, selling to a committee vs. an individual with account-based marketing (ABM) and making a move towards asynchronous selling.
While there are many upsides to this alignment, there are just as many obstacles facing teams as they try to get on the same page. Read on to break down the top six challenges facing B2B marketing and sales teams as they try to align, as well as a few solutions for making team alignment a reality.
1. Inconsistent Lead Qualification and Marketing-to-Sales Handoff
The marketing-to-sales handoff seems simple enough: when a lead becomes qualified for sales (a sales-qualified lead, or an SQL), it’s the marketing team’s job to ensure that their sales colleagues know about it.
What could go wrong? The answer is…a lot.
To generalize, there are two areas where this handoff can go poorly.
The first is the qualifying criteria or the agreement around when the right time is to hand the lead off to sales. Think about it: what are your marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and SQL criteria? What are you using to ensure that these criteria are met for handoffs day-to-day? How nuanced are the qualifications?
Disparities in how marketing and sales teams define and handle leads can result in lost opportunities and wasted resources. If your sales and marketing team may have different answers to these questions, the result can be handoff nightmares.
The second problem area involves the mechanism for your handoffs. Are your marketing leads rotated automatically once qualified, or do they already have an owner before they ever get to that stage? Do you assign your sales rep a task, push a notification, send them an email, notify them in Slack, or some combination of these options?
Tools like Marketing Hub and Sales Hub are great at facilitating this process, but the process only works insofar as it has been defined. The marketing-to-sales handoff must be thought through and agreed upon by both teams to be successful – a task made much more difficult if your teams are not operating in the same systems.
The Solution to Inconsistent Lead Qualification and Marketing-to-Sales Handoff
To address a less-than-perfect handoff from marketing to sales, have a meeting between your marketing operations and sales operations teams to agree on the complete parameters of your lifecycle stages.
Develop a standardized lead scoring and qualification process, and ensure a smooth handoff from marketing to sales, with clear criteria and expectations.
Ask your teams what role the deal stage, lead score, buying committee makeup, and ICP tier play in the timing and manner of the handoff?
Handoffs can change from team to team, ICP tier to ICP tier, and product to product.
Next, pull some reports to see at what lifecycle stage sales became involved in winning opportunities to objectively determine what has been most successful to date.
Finally, once everyone agrees on the terms of your lifecycle stages and when and how sales should be tapped to jump in, update your CRM, marketing automation platform, and other technology to accommodate these newly agreed-upon handoff guidelines.
2. Disparate Data and Technology Systems
There are hundreds of tools that your sales and marketing teams could use to run their daily tasks.
What’s the result? A list of tech tools the size of Amazon’s navigation for your marketing operations team to deal with.
Marketing and sales often use different systems and tools to track data, making it difficult to get a unified view of the customer journey and measure performance accurately.
For marketing and sales activities especially those that require a handoff data accuracy is everything. And the more tools you have, the lower the chances are that your data is reliable.
Too many systems can lead to:
- Too much context switching and the necessary info not being added to the correct tool
- System syncing issues and resulting data gaps
- No single source of truth for decision-making about the success or failure of your efforts
- Misaligned handoff and scoring criteria
The Solution for Disparate Data and Technology Systems
Disparate Data and Technology Systems can be one of the harder problems to solve because organizations may have multiple internal stakeholders and decision-makers involved. Nevertheless, there are a few ways to address this issue.
First, you can look at moving all of your marketing and sales operations into a single tool like HubSpot, where Marketing Hub and Sales Hub can accommodate all of the needs for marketing and sales alignment and provide a seamless experience for your customers.
Integrate data and technology platforms to create a single source of truth. Use CRM systems that align with both marketing automation and sales management tools.
If combining systems is not an option, consider doing an audit of where information is not being collected, synced, and updated between systems. This can impact things like lead scoring and lifecycle stage updates, which are crucial to keeping sales and marketing aligned. Reporting can also be impacted and lead to decisions made on incomplete information.
Additionally, you will want to do a capabilities assessment of your current systems to ensure that they can achieve all of your goals. Can your systems trigger actions in one another to ensure that both sales and marketing stay on the same page? If not, check outside of your tools’ native functionality using platforms like Zapier or Workato.
3. Poor Communication and Collaboration
Without clear communication, marketing and sales teams might pursue different strategies and objectives. Marketing may focus on generating a high volume of leads, while sales may prioritize high-quality leads, resulting in conflicting efforts and wasted resources.
Poor collaboration leads to inefficient lead handoffs. Marketing may generate leads that sales deem unqualified, causing frustration and wasted effort. Conversely, sales might not follow up promptly on qualified leads provided by marketing.
When communication is lacking, both teams may miss opportunities to cross-sell or upsell. Marketing might not be aware of sales’ feedback on what customers need, leading to campaigns that don’t resonate. Sales might not leverage marketing content that could aid in closing deals.
Disjointed communication can result in an inconsistent customer experience. Prospective customers might receive mixed messages or duplicated efforts from marketing and sales, leading to confusion and a negative perception of the company.
Misunderstandings and frustrations stemming from poor communication can demotivate both teams. A lack of collaboration can create an adversarial environment, reducing overall productivity and job satisfaction.
The Solution to Poor Communication and Collaboration
Schedule regular meetings between marketing and sales teams to discuss goals, strategies, and performance. This ensures both teams are aligned and aware of each other’s activities and challenges.
Use integrated communication platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or collaborative CRM systems to facilitate real-time communication and information sharing between marketing and sales.
Define shared goals and metrics that both teams are accountable for, such as revenue targets, lead quality, and customer satisfaction scores. This promotes a unified approach to achieving common objectives.
Implement training programs that educate marketing and sales teams about each other’s roles, processes, and challenges. This fosters empathy and understanding, enabling better collaboration.
Develop and agree on a standardized lead scoring and qualification process. Ensure that marketing and sales teams jointly define what constitutes a qualified lead, and establish clear criteria and processes for lead handoff.
Involve both teams in content creation to ensure marketing materials align with sales needs and resonate with target customers. Sales can provide insights into customer pain points and preferences, which marketing can use to craft effective campaigns.
Finally, create formal feedback loops where sales can provide insights to marketing about the quality of leads and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This feedback helps marketing refine their strategies and better support sales efforts.
4. Misaligned Goals, Metrics & the Battle Over MQLs
Marketing and sales teams often have different goals and metrics for success. Marketing might focus on brand awareness and lead generation, while sales prioritize closing deals and revenue.
All marketers are familiar with this play: gate content to capture an MQL to then send to a sales/business development rep (SDR or BDR, respectively). That SDR/BDR then prospects in concert with marketing to move this person into the coveted SQL lifecycle stage.
Once the lead becomes an SQL, the account executive takes over and closes the deal, won or lost.
This play seems fair enough on its face. It has been used thousands of times by thousands of marketers. But if we’re talking about alignment, this play relies on a process laden with potential land mines.
Think about it: if the marketing team has a goal to drive MQLs and they are assessed based on their ability to meet that goal, their sole focus will be on how to get as many gated content downloads as possible.
What’s the issue with that? Well, it turns out that the audience most likely to read your content is not necessarily the audience that wants to buy your product now.
If sales is judged by the number of MQLs they convert to opportunities, company friction is baked into the system: the marketing team meeting their goals is out of alignment with sales reaching their goals.
Teams focusing on generating MQLs rather than revenue and demand will continue to struggle with alignment and will leave themselves ill-prepared to run ABM campaigns or to provide a seamless experience for their customers.
The Solution to the Goals, Metrics, and MQL Battle
Establish shared goals and metrics, such as revenue targets or customer acquisition costs, to ensure both teams are working towards the same outcomes.
Reach out to your sales counterparts and have a conversation about how you can set up processes, regular stand ups, and other means of listening to and learning from each other.
Sales can teach marketing a lot. For instance, what happens on calls with MQLs? What objections does the sales team run into over and over? Which content assets do people make mention of in calls?
On the other hand, sales can learn from their colleagues on the marketing side of the house. What content is marketing serving and why? How have they altered the targeting, and how is sales seeing it play out in sales calls? What content is consumed most in deals that result in “closed-won” outcomes?
Once sales and marketing have more understanding of one another, they can make informed choices that help both teams win. Once there is mutual understanding, the teams can begin to have conversations about important choices that can greatly impact pipeline:
- Should we focus on capturing MQLs or should we ungate content to drive demand?
- Should we define an MQL differently than we currently do?
- How can we support asynchronous buying and get prospects to SQL or sales-qualified opportunity (SQO) status before getting sales involved?
This is a much more productive line of questioning than “Why did you send me so many junk leads this month?”
5. Cultural and Organizational Silos
When marketing and sales operate in silos, they often develop separate strategies that may not align with each other. A fragmentation can lead to inconsistent messaging and a lack of cohesive efforts towards common business goals.
Silos can cause duplication of efforts and inefficient use of resources. For example, marketing might invest in generating leads that sales do not prioritize or follow up on, leading to wasted time and budget.
Customers may receive inconsistent information and experience disjointed interactions with the company. The lack of a unified approach can lead to confusion and a negative perception of the company, harming customer relationships.
Organizational silos stifle collaboration and knowledge sharing, which are critical for innovation. When teams do not collaborate, they miss out on valuable insights and opportunities to improve products, services, and processes.
The Solution to Cultural and Organizational Silos
Promote a culture that values collaboration and teamwork. Encourage cross-functional projects and initiatives that require input and cooperation from both marketing and sales teams.
Ensure that leadership from both departments actively supports and models collaborative behavior. Leadership should communicate the importance of alignment and work together to set shared objectives.
Develop and implement shared processes and workflows for key activities, such as lead generation, lead qualification, and customer follow-up. Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team in these processes.
Conduct joint planning and strategy sessions where marketing and sales teams can collaboratively develop and refine strategies. This ensures that both teams have a voice in the planning process and that strategies are aligned.
6. Running Successful ABM Plays
The final alignment challenge in this series is the challenge of running successful ABM plays with misaligned teams. At the end of the day, you just can’t do it!
All of the problem areas outlined above – poor handoffs, disparate systems, inconsistent data, and arm wrestling over MQLs can prevent an organization from running successful ABM plays, especially at scale.
Why is it so hard to knock your ABM goals out of the park when sales and marketing aren’t talking? It’s because ABM requires that you’re not only aligned on one single MQL or SQL definition – you have to define an entire buying committee. This means even more handoffs, system, data, and goal alignment.
The Solution to ABM Alignment Issues
If you are a HubSpot user, you likely know that you have a plethora of HubSpot tools to use for your ABM plays:
- Target Account property
- ICP Tier property
- Account Overview
- Suggested Target Account AI tool
- Prospects tool to see accounts who have visited your website
- ABM and Target Account dashboards
- Company scoring
- Buying role properties
- Workflow automation
- Chatbot or live chat
- Automated lead rotation
- Ads conversion events
Here are some steps you can take to align your team for ABM:
- Verify that you have been collecting job titles and buying roles. If you have not, go back through your last quarter of closed deals and manually enter this information or update via workflows. For example, you can make sure to indicate that a certain job title is always a decision-maker.
- Create a dashboard to understand the buying roles that have been involved in your recent deals and who usually shows up to the buying table first.
- Have a meeting between sales and marketing to review this information and agree upon the buying committee and who to prioritize.
- Follow the other solutions outlined above to ensure that your teams are aligned on goals, lifecycle stage definitions, the handoff process, and that your data is clean and your systems are talking.
- Finally, use your Target Account and ABM tools to set up a campaign to support the alignment built between sales and marketing.
Who says that sales and marketing can’t play well together? More often than not, alignment is within reach and takes a little bit of learning and listening, followed by consistent action, to achieve.
