Better together: Strategies for aligning sales and marketing teams

When you boil it all down, sales and marketing teams have the same ultimate goal: Business growth. Despite this, many organizations still say they need help aligning and uniting sales and marketing teams. 

Aside from creating an uncomfortable and potentially unproductive working environment, misalignment between teams can limit a business’s potential for growth. 

As persistent as this problem appears to be, there are many business leaders out there who have managed to solve it. After hearing some of their insights, it became clear that divisions tend to start because of processes, not people. Specifically: 

1. Misaligned goals and KPIs

2. Disagreement over an established lead scoring methodology 

3. Siloed tech tools

4. Communication barriers

In this article, we’ll share their insights along with practical solutions that can help your organization bring sales and marketing together for supercharged growth. 

Align goals and KPIs around more tangible business metrics 

Misaligned goals and KPIs are a pervasive problem that must be fixed to align teams. This starts with lead types. When marketing teams are KPI’d against marketing qualified leads (MQLs), but sales teams disagree with the definition of an MQL, the two teams can wind up in loggerheads debating what a ‘hot’ lead truly is. 

One of the best ways to overcome this and unblock your teams is to focus on real business metrics — in other words, revenue goals. 

In an episode of Grow & Tell, Nico Dato, CMO of Entrata shared, “At the end of the day, the thing we're trying to do is drive revenue…the MQL metric is not a real metric, in my opinion. It's subjective.”

Instead, he says you need to look at steps that allow you to, “create predictability and conversion rates down the funnel, like demos or opportunities.”

Mark Hayes, Head of Growth Marketing at Task Software, told us implementing shared goals around real business metrics helped him bridge the divide. “Examples here include cost of customer acquisition, lead conversion rates, and revenue targets. We implement these goals through regular reviews of the KPIs in joint meetings where the teams can track, discuss, and adjust their strategies.”

This means rather than the marketing team being KPI’d against MQLs, they are tracking towards metrics that are more aligned with the traditional description of an SQL — and therefore feeding the funnel with more predictable and reliable leads. 

Whatever goals you decide to set, Mark points out the need for data sharing and analytics using shared dashboards. 

Agree on a lead scoring methodology

Even if you do decide to ditch the MQL metric, you’ll need to score your leads to help marketing better understand which channels drive the best leads and help sales prioritize. This, too, can become a point of contention when sales and marketing are not in agreeance over what a ‘hot lead’ really looks like. For the most part, demographic and firmographic data points are easy to agree on — it’s behavioral data where things get murky. 

In a webinar around lead scoring, Ortto co-founder and CEO Michael Sharkey said, “We think about touchpoints indicating intent through a marketing frame of reference—they engaged with our content and therefore they must be interested in buying our product—but that's not the right framing for how we should be thinking about scoring leads. And we also rarely look at the correlation with revenue. For the most part, I think this is because marketers just don't have access to a lot of this data, but what we do have access to are the marketing touchpoints, so that's what we rely on.” 

To bridge this divide, first you need to consolidate your data so you can better understand which marketing activities are really having an impact on revenue. Then, the two teams should work together to look at the data and agree on actions or behaviors that actually correlate with intent. 

When you set your lead scoring up, set the activities up to degrade over time, while firmographic and demographic data stays static — this will ensure the score you see is relevant in that moment. 

Once you have your lead scoring model in place, hot leads should be treated as such. In other words, sales teams should be jumping on them immediately.

Tony Mariotto, CEO of RubyHome, emphasized the importance of automation here. “We use automated workflows to score leads, ensuring sales teams prioritize high-potential leads. This increases efficiency and effectiveness. For example, a lead who downloads multiple property guides receives a higher score and immediate follow-up from our sales team.”

Consolidate tech stacks and break down data silos

In the first two points, we heard about the need for shared data and analytics, and a common lead scoring methodology. Both of these things require software. If each team is working in a different platform, it’s likely they’ll miss important context that helps them attract and land more business. 

Having one tool that does it all isn’t always possible, nor is it necessary. For example, it’s common for sales teams to “live” in a CRM like Salesforce, while marketing teams spend their days in marketing automation tools, advertising platforms, and in tools like Google Analytics. 

Instead, it’s best to think about which tool in your stack will be your source of truth. Then, you can use integrations to consolidate data from the tools your teams use to get a single view of customer journey. 

The advantage of this approach, said Will Yang, Head of Growth and Marketing at Instrumentl, is that, “both teams can access real-time data on customer interactions. This ensures everyone is on the same page about lead status and customer interactions.When marketing campaigns drive leads, sales can see those efforts directly and follow up appropriately.”

From a marketing perspective, consolidating martech tools in this way helps to better track the impact of campaigns, allowing for more accurate and strategic channel prioritization and campaign optimization. As Brandon Leong, VP Marketing and Growth at Screencastify, shared, “Having the reporting and tracking native to the tool that you're actually using to affect them is massive. Because what that gives you is the opportunity to think ahead.” 

For sales, consolidating data can give you more context for sales calls and demos. For example, seeing which ads were clicked, web pages explored, or content consumed can help give you a better understanding of the problems they might be facing and how you can position your product as a solution. 

In short — your teams live in their tools. If they’re living in two different places, they’re less likely to achieve alignment. 

Relatedly, Alex Kracov, CEO at Dock, points out the importance of a centralized content management system to ensure sales are using the latest and greatest collateral. “Salespeople often can’t wait for — or simply can’t find — marketing’s latest up-to-date case study or proposal. Their prospects are waiting and the deal is on the line, so they improvise. 

A powerful solution—and one we advocate for at Dock—is a centralized content management system that’s built for both cross-team collaboration and a smooth customer experience.”

Make cross-departmental communication easier

Enabling cross-departmental communication is not just about setting up more regular meetings. It seems like a solution — more time together should equal more communication, right? But more often than not these scheduled meetings become a bit of a burden for teams who are stretched thin or working on urgent deals. 

Instead, get creative and think of automations and initiatives that might help open up the lines of communication without clogging up the calendars. 

For example, we spoke to Ari Goldstein, Growth Marketing Manager at Siteline, who told us events were by far the company’s biggest revenue generator. Communication with the wider team is crucial on event days, but it’s unrealistic to expect the team on the ground to be updating the team at the office. 

Instead, Ari said, “I’ve automated a message to be sent to a Slack channel. We’ll have a couple of team members at the conference, and as they’re working the floor and adding leads, our inbounds thread in Slack is populating, so people can feel the momentum. We’re a small startup and we’re remote, so anything that gives you presence is great.”

You can also look at a meeting shadowing program where sales or marketing team members can opt-in to shadow calls when convenient. 

Axel Lavergne, Founder at Reviewflowz, recommends inviting marketing team members to shadow sales calls and vice versa, saying, “This builds empathy and understanding of each team's challenges and strengths. Our marketing team gained valuable insights by joining sales in customer demo calls, which helped refine our messaging strategies.” 

Final word: Make alignment easy 

If you need to fix an alignment issue, look at the system you have in place instead of the people.

A team bonding experience won't eliminate sales frustrations around lead quality, but sharing a revenue goal or agreeing on a lead scoring methodology could.

Adding meetings to the calendar is unlikely to bridge the divide, but consolidating data and tech tools in the name of complete transparency could.

When the goals and processes are clear and shared, alignment comes more naturally.