The 5 indicators of healthy sales-marketing alignment

1. Do you have a shared language?

I recently worked with an organization where the sales and marketing teams were at a standstill over the poor state of leads. When the two sides were forced to sit down, we uncovered that the business development representative team and the marketing team defined leads differently.

The frustration between teams in organizations, especially marketing and sales, comes from being faceless colleagues without a common language or understanding.

I asked both teams: "What does a marketing-qualified lead mean?"

The sales team's answer: "A 'hot lead' is someone who wants to talk to us, and we should work quickly to contact them."

The marketing team's answer: "We started out with MQL [a marketing-qualified lead] being someone who reaches a certain score threshold or fills out the Contact Us form and is well vetted, but there was a new directive from leadership to increase lead flow. So, we made MQL anyone who fills out any type of form on our site."

So, the sales team thinks they're getting people who are eager to talk to them. The marketing team knows the contact is someone who just signed up for a blog and has little to no interest in receiving outreach. Complete misalignment. How does that happen?

This company, like so many, has sales and marketing systems set up over time, and often under different leadership and strategies than what exists in the present. As a result, the language used at the onset can get lost.

Solution: We sat in the room until we got to a rubric that both sales and marketing agreed upon.

Below are former and newly agreed-upon definitions throughout the top of the funnel that the teams now use regularly to discuss the process.

2. Do you have service-level agreements?

How long does a sales team have to acknowledge, act on and accept or reject a lead from a marketing team? This is possibly the most important element in the sales and marketing alignment process and it also creates the most headaches. For the handoff to be successful, both teams must agree upon service-level agreements (SLAs) and systems for monitoring.

The SLA should include how much time each team has to move the lead forward. For example, the chart in Figure 1 details that from the time a prospect fills out a Contact Us form as a handraiser, the marketing department has four hours to send that to a sales person -- though it often happens instantly. Then, the sales rep has four hours to acknowledge they are aware of the lead through the CRM system, and four more hours to decide if they want to work it.

CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot can send alerts when SLAs are missed. Those alerts are sent over email to the salesperson. The marketing team also updates a shared dashboard with daily, weekly and/or monthly temperature checks on the health of the sales funnel.

Both teams must review the SLA and system results in ongoing meetings. Over time, they show patterns. Do specific salespeople not get the leads properly? Are the marketing team's scores off, so they send the wrong leads? Discussing these in weekly or bimonthly meetings can prevent lead backup and increase clarity and communication.

3. Do you have agreed-upon prospect titles?

It doesn't matter if lead flow is paid or organic. Understanding what defines a successful lead is key.

Creating personas based on company size, geography and department are all part of the process. One of the most important is the title. When asked, many salespeople will say, "I'll take any title." However, most B2B salespeople need specific leads in specific roles. Whether you need to build a case with junior-level practitioners or get the buy-in of C-suite, you should do enough audience testing and encourage feedback between marketing and sales teams to determine the titles of who to target.

4. Is there consistent reporting from marketing to sales teams?

Looking back to pre-pandemic data, we see more than half of marketers did not feel empowered to collaborate with sales teams, according to Salesforce. In the subsequent years, marketers found it harder to collaborate with colleagues. The data over time is getting worse, so how do you create successful collaboration between marketing and sales teams with specific checks and balances?

Creating a dashboard puts the groups' collective needs in one place and can help create alignment. It enables asynchronous understanding and collaboration among key stakeholders, decreases confusion and increases healthy discussions. It becomes a source of truth for the groups.

Still, the biggest success I've seen as a marketer was established, ongoing lead meetings approximately two times per month where we reviewed macro and micro lead flow. Macro includes overall volume, trends and opportunities for improvement. Micro involves pulling two to four leads from the previous two weeks and telling their journeys. I've often grabbed headshots and LinkedIn profiles, in addition to walking the sales team through the digital experience of leads, including how they entered and whether they converted to handraisers or learners.

It's important to humanize the people coming through the funnel and to show both wins and losses.

5. Do sales teams provide consistent feedback to marketing teams?

Things change. Marketing and sales teams are dynamic, and their systems must be reviewed and revisited constantly. The titles you agreed to in January might not convert in June. Those changes are fine, but only if both teams understand the changes through system feedback and ongoing dialogue. Organic and paid channels only improve with feedback more descriptive than saying, "bad lead."

So, organizations can implement a sales and marketing summit twice a year to ensure all key stakeholders are still aligned to the philosophy, terminology and expectations. A one or two hour-long meeting can help avoid days of confusion, frustration and a lost pipeline.

We are all on a bumpy highway of this unstable economy and confusing business climate. Creating a common language and understanding between sales and marketing teams can help to smooth the road and provide a better overall climate to achieve a successful alignment and a healthy pipeline.

About the author
Aimee Schuster is CEO and founder at Bandwidth Strategy, a fractional C-suite consulting group that empowers B2B organizations in growth mode. She has over 20 years experience leading early and mid-staged organizations in operations, marketing and sales. Aimee is the co-founder of Women Influence Chicago, a leadership accelerator for women technologists, a board member and angel investor.