How To Align Sales and Marketing?

Shownotes

Sales and marketing need to be aligned at a high level but also be aligned on the specific tactics or campaigns or accounts targeted to maximize impact and success. Tracking sales growth is critical in making the most informed decisions about where to allocate your resources. It’s important for both sides to feel supported and work together as a team, not just go their separate ways. The key is to align strategy with execution and navigate the complex challenges of running a successful business.

About the Guest

Saber is a global B2B Marketing Capability Leader and a leader in Commercial Excellence practice focused on technology and industrial companies. He has extensive experience in driving growth via integrated sales and marketing disciplines, including demand generation, pipeline management, and sales play design. Saber recently led GTM transformation, including the route to market design, sales play system to install, and ABM program launch. He has 15+ years of consulting experience and works out of Bain’s Dallas office.

Connect with Saber Sherrad

Key Takeaways

Saber discusses how the sales and marketing disconnect can be from a lack of alignment on what the company’s strategy is and how they want to execute it.
It can also be a lack of integration between the different marketing channels that a company uses, which can lead to duplicate efforts or ineffective campaigns.
Interestingly enough, as an organization gets larger, the disconnect gets worse.
Some of the best Go-To-Market engines are those that are more aligned with their strategic goals and use more integrated metrics.
It is important to have a unique understanding of where buyers are looking and what they are interested in.
Buyers are going deep into the buying journey digitally. The growth in the number of people involved in buying decisions over two years changed drastically.

Quotes

“You need to have a unique understanding of where your buyers are looking and where they’re being informed and where they’re getting guidance.” – Saber Sherrard

Highlights from the Episode

How do we deal with the rising disconnect between sales and marketing?

There are a number of ways sales and marketing can be disconnected. Saber’s research found that only 50% of sellers actually believe marketing is strategically aligned with them. At the highest level, the highest performing board market engines are not treating marketing and sales as independent functions, but instead, treat them as sort of two integral pieces to a high-performing Go-To-Market engine.

How do you become “The First Vendor to the Door” when MQL is dead?

We have to acknowledge that buyers are more digitally enabled than ever before. They want to be able to identify vendors, establish the criteria that they want to use to make a decision, be able to do comparisons, and be able to actually make decisions on who they buy, in many cases, all before they talk to anyone. Studies show that over 80% of buyers have set their specs before talking to a sales rep.

How powerful are cross-functional influencers and creating tailor-made content?

There’s a material growth in the number of cross-functional people involved in a buying decision between those two data points. Now, more and more people are involved in big decisions across varying functions. In curating tailor-made content, timing does matter.

Is there any book, podcast, video, or other resources that you’d like to recommend?