Cross-collaboration with sales is crucial to account-based marketing success.
Marketing teams are often pigeonholed into developing a marketing strategy that either focuses solely on top of funnel marketing motions that fuel the sales pipeline or the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) they need to gain to hit their departmental goals.
Both options lack a sense of collaboration. If marketers only qualify leads based on their marketing actions, the sales team receives leads that may not be qualified candidates for your product or offering. Yet if sales were to only focus on sales qualified leads (SQLs), there would still be an ample delay in delivering quality communication and pitches, as leads provide deeper insights into who they are and what they’re looking for through the actions they take throughout the discovery phase of the buyer’s journey—which falls under marketing’s umbrella of building brand awareness through ABM content and messaging.
Your sales pipeline strategy can’t function under a “marketing does this and sales does that” mentality. Poor coordination between sales and marketing functions leads to sluggish sales velocity—which impacts the company’s bottom line. Businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals and 58% better at retaining customers. That’s why you need full-funnel sales and marketing alignment, including regular meetings that cover reporting on marketing campaigns; the state of alignment for campaign messaging, sales outreach, and nurture strategy; and cross-functional feedback loops to optimize marketing campaigns and sales enablement to ensure you’re meeting your goals and moving lead generation through the sales pipeline.
Read on to learn how to align sales and marketing teams for success across the entire sales funnel in nine steps.
The Problem with Sales and Marketing Misalignment
According to Harvard Business Review, a whopping 90% of sales and marketing professionals report misalignment in terms of their organizations’ strategy, process, culture, and content marketing. Nearly all respondents of the same survey believe this misalignment harms the business and its customers.
The problem is that while sales and marketing teams essentially work toward the same goal—to increase sales pipeline and revenue—each team’s success has traditionally been measured differently. Marketing is historically measured by the number of leads generated for the sales pipeline. For sales, success is measured by revenue generated by closed deals and the impact of those engagements on the deal value and length of the contract. Revenue goals depend on the volume and value of the sales pipeline, which both teams are responsible for.
But what happens when the revenue target is missed? The finger-pointing begins. Sales may claim the leads were of low quality, while marketing argues that sales didn’t effectively follow up or nurture the opportunities. This blame game not only fosters resentment between teams but also wastes time and resources.
The data doesn’t lie: misalignment between sales and marketing is a widespread ABM challenge that directly impacts business growth, as highlighted in LeanData’s Sales and Marketing Survey Pulse report:
- 51% of marketers surveyed rated the communication between teams as unsatisfactory; 53% of sales reps are unhappy with marketing support
- 38% of sales reps surveyed stated they are unaware of marketing’s goals
- 68% of marketers say that up to half of their marketing qualified leads are ignored or disqualified by sales; 51% of sales professionals say they disqualify up to half of the marketing qualified leads they receive
- 48% of sales said they don’t trust the pipeline and revenue attribution numbers that marketing reports, while 39% of marketers said they don’t even trust their own numbers
Do any of these pain points sound familiar? As challenging as they appear, these conflicting complaints and concerns can be resolved with a thoughtful strategy that considers how each team can assist the other.
Why Sales and Marketing Alignment Is So Important
For marketers looking to deploy account-based marketing (ABM) efforts, alignment with sales isn’t just helpful—it’s essential. This alignment is crucial to achieving the full-funnel, personalized customer experience that leads to sales meetings, higher ROI of your media investment, and customer lifetime value.
Sales and marketing alignment is important because it enables your teams to remove data silos and instead effectively execute full-funnel ABM by clearly defining:
- Who to target: Identifying the right accounts and decision-makers within them.
- What to say: Crafting consistent, personalized, and impactful messaging and content that resonates with each persona.
- When to engage: Timing outreach to align with where prospects are in their buyer’s journey.
- How to follow up: Establishing a cohesive account-based marketing plan for nurturing leads and building long-term relationships.
Major brands attest to an ABM strategy bringing their cross-functional alignment and goals into focus, as both teams can deliver a strong top-of-funnel experience that establishes a clear and personalized experience, so accounts want to go deeper into the funnel. Katrina Kilgas, B2B Media Manager at Shell Lubricant Solutions says:
When your teams work together to provide customers with a robust and personalized experience, customers are more likely to trust and remain loyal to you based on the education and value you provided over their purchase decision. You become their preferred vendor, and that translates to more investments, longer contracts, and predictive value for your revenue. It is the North Star of ABM. This requires an aligned marketing and sales effort focused on impactful messaging and a strong customer experience, even after you close the deal.
9 Steps to Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment
When sales and marketing are aligned, it’s a true testament to the saying, “Teamwork makes the dream work.”
When these two teams work in unison, they can effectively identify, engage, and convert target accounts, resulting in shorter sales cycles, higher close rates, and stronger relationships with key stakeholders. Let’s take a look at nine actionable steps to foster collaboration and alignment between sales and marketing in an ABM strategy.
Step 1: Discuss the Marketplace and Sales Pipeline
Sales insights inform more than your content strategy—they also inform campaign pacing and timelines. Learning how campaign performance aligns with the sales cycle is key. If sales pick up because of a campaign, marketing can then replicate that campaign strategy to keep the momentum going. Of course, sales and marketing teams also need to understand buyer behavior, as there are most likely general benchmarks and standards around the product and industry where buyers are more (or less) likely to be in market (such as seasonality).
Grounding your shared understanding of the marketplace and sales pipeline in data ensures both teams are working toward factual evidence of what buyers need to make decisions about products or services, versus what each team believes buyers want and need. Leverage intent data to uncover the accounts moving in-market, the buying committee members to engage, and the content most likely to move them through the buyer’s journey. This data-driven approach ensures both teams engage B2B buyers with a better understanding of their motivations and business concerns.
These meetings need to occur on a regular basis, and are perfect opportunities to discuss specific sales enablement pieces or new marketing collateral that will fuel campaign initiatives. Marketing and sales teams can also share what trends they notice in the marketplace and among their target audience to ensure marketing can create content that speaks to buyers’ concerns.
Step 2: Set Clear Qualification Standards
One of marketing’s goals is to provide sales teams with the types of leads that will convert, as opposed to simply handing off every inbound lead. Yet marketers will often hand every lead over for sales follow-up, which leads to a low volume of qualified leads. According to Gleanster Research, only 25% of marketing-generated leads are high enough quality to advance to a sale.
To ensure smooth collaboration, build consistent terminology between sales and marketing by establishing guidelines for a unified company voice. This consistency not only aligns marketing content with sales dialogue, but also strengthens the overall customer journey.
As you’re developing your lead nurture programs, make sure you understand exactly what your sales team classifies as a “hot lead.” Having a better understanding of what makes a lead worthy for sales engagement helps you design a nurture strategy that will get them there. It’s also important to revisit your shared qualification standards regularly and update them as prospects, buyer personas, and leads evolve. Go beyond terminology and work together to define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target account list (TAL). A shared understanding of your target audience enables marketing to tailor strategies that attract and nurture the right leads, ultimately empowering sales to close deals more effectively.
Step 3: Determine Marketing & Sales Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Driving sales engagement is a shared KPI between marketing and sales. Marketing materials drive brand awareness and primes prospects for sales outreach. But insights from the sales team deepen everyone’s understanding of how the sales funnel, from campaigns to buyer behaviors, impact departmental metrics.
Your KPIs outline your goals through quantifiable ABM measurements. When the marketing and sales team creates KPIs and both individual and common goals across each channel, everyone has a tangible indicator toward what a successful marketing, outreach, and nurture strategy means based on the numbers. ABM KPIs also feed into segmenting leads in terms of the buying stage and buying group. The marketing and sales team can then deepen their understanding in how buyer behaviors and demographics impact urgency throughout the buyer’s journey.
Develop goals and set KPIs that are consistent between the departments so that both sales and marketing look toward the same “North Star.” If your sales and marketing teams don’t work toward the same goals, it’s like trying to run a three-legged race to two finish lines in different directions. However, by working together to achieve the same goals and running towards the same finish line, both teams will be able to work faster and more effectively.
Step 4: Understand the Lead Scoring Model for Optimal Outreach Results
Sales teams easily fire off emails or pick up the phone as soon as a lead comes through. But if it takes more than 13 touches to prepare a lead for a sales conversation, it doesn’t make sense for personal follow-ups for every inbound lead.
A lead scoring model helps align your sales and marketing teams around a common understanding of a qualified lead and what the next steps are once you hand a lead off to pursue for outreach. To do this, marketing and sales need to agree on the scoring criteria, the thresholds for different lead stages, the handoff process, and the feedback mechanism. You also need to review and update your lead scoring system regularly to ensure it reflects changing market conditions and customer preferences.
For example, Diana Viola, Performance Marketing Manager at ecommerce platform company Amilia, and her team utilized engagement insights and alerts to equip their sales team with quality data and engagement scores, enabling them to have meaningful, well-timed interactions. This seamless alignment between marketing and sales ensured that Amilia targeted their most valuable accounts in real time, ultimately surpassing their pipeline target by an impressive 746%, with 30% of that pipeline directly influenced by campaigns run through Madison Logic.
Watch Now: How Amilia Leverages Marketing and Sales Alignment for ABM Success
Step 5: Matchmake Leads Across the Sales Team
Think about your offering alongside your lead’s intent and engagement, then pair them with the most qualified sales representative who can speak to the lead’s specific concerns. The better that initial sales interaction is, the more trust you establish to continue the conversation toward later funnel stages and build a positive customer experience that ultimately supports future customer expansion and customer retention.
Step 6: Lean Into Creativity for Follow-Up Communication
Inboxes are saturated with emails, and more people are avoiding phone calls from unknown numbers. Marketing teams can provide different ideas for outreach initiatives. Instead of a LinkedIn message, sales team members can send a LinkedIn voice message or video to the lead, which adds a sense of familiarity and personalization to really warm a lead up to interacting with the representative.
Step 7: Align Messaging Within Sales Outreach
Marketing’s brand awareness efforts make it very likely that inbound leads are familiar with your offering. When salespeople reach out, they need to not focus on introducing your solution—they need to introduce themselves and personalize the message to show they understand what the lead needs to move forward.
Marketing motions inform your B2B buyer personalization efforts in terms of your content strategy and outreach messaging. Marketing should create outreach templates that match the buyer persona and outline a specific problem, while offering room for the sales team to personalize the messaging. Providing customizable messaging templates allows sales teams to create a positive experience while ensuring relevant content and messaging continues to recognize the lead’s engagement actions and funnel stage.
Keep in mind that customization still requires guidelines. Build consistent terminology between sales and marketing by developing guidelines for one consistent company voice. Developing consistent terminology helps align your marketing content with sales outreach so that leads are not jolted by any messaging that seems too far “off the cusp.” To that end, keep B2B buyer personas in mind to ensure that the right message truly targets and reaches the right person at the right time.
Step 8: Gather Feedback Proactively
The sales team gets a direct line to your prospective buyers. Dig into what sales reps are learning as they pursue the lead and the prospective meeting. The answers are crucial to continue refining and developing the right messaging for current and future campaigns.
Questions marketers should ask the sales team about their conversations with prospects include:
- What are you learning from these meetings?
- What objections are you hearing for not taking the call when you begin outreach?
- What pain points are you experiencing in the follow-up sales process?
- How many touches do you need before the meeting occurs?
- How often do people schedule a meeting and not show up?
You can gather feedback at the same time you discuss marketplace updates and the current state of the sales pipeline. After all, building sales and marketing alignment is a constant process that doesn’t just involve data—but people, too. When both teams show consistent effort and interest in improving each other’s workflows and initiatives, customers benefit from stronger messaging and content, while the company benefits from revenue growth.
There should be consistency in the processes at every point where sales and marketing intersect, particularly in communication. Implement regular meetings between the two teams to ensure alignment, where each department can discuss their goals, priorities, and analyze results. Consider holding onboarding meetings with every new salesperson to explain how marketing will support the sales team, and to discuss specific content pieces that may be useful. Marketing should also keep sales informed about the progression of content in development, as the sales team often has valuable insights on what content resonates most with potential customers. This collaborative approach helps ensure both teams are aligned and working toward shared objectives.
Step 9: Team Bonding
The most effective way to speed up sales and marketing alignment is to build personal relationships between your team members. Be genuine and have fun! Whether it’s a team lunch, an offsite retreat, or casual virtual hangouts, these bonding experiences foster organic communication and strengthen collaboration. Ultimately, when sales and marketing teams connect on a personal level, they’re better equipped to work together seamlessly and align on goals, driving greater win rates and conversion rates.
Examples of Marketing and Sales Alignment Success
Want to see what happens when marketing and sales alignment is done right? Here are a few of the best account-based marketing campaigns that highlight the power of collaboration:
Amilia: Ecommerce Platform
Diana Viola, Performance Marketing Manager and her team at Amilia leveraged actionable ABM engagement insights from Madison Logic to align sales and marketing, focusing on high-value accounts in real time. This collaboration exceeded their pipeline target by 746%, with 30% of the pipeline influenced by Madison Logic campaigns.
Akamai Technologies: Cloud Computing
Max Kaskons, Senior Digital Marketing Program Manager, credits Madison Logic for helping his team at Akamai drive quality site traffic, engage new accounts, and lower cost per lead through multi-channel ABM programs. Max highlights that ABM’s biggest benefit is its alignment across teams, allowing them to target accounts with laser-focused precision and achieve better results.
Shell Lubricant Solutions: Industrial Solutions
Through its partnership with Madison Logic, Katrina Kilgas, B2B Media Manager and the Shell team have achieved enhanced marketing and sales alignment, fostering greater collaboration and focus. This alignment has led to a more effective and streamlined targeting strategy, enabling Shell Lubricant Solutions to identify and pursue key accounts with precision.
Read Shell Lubricant Solutions Case Study
Power Your Growth Through Alignment
Good things happen when sales and marketing align. By working together, both teams can create a unified strategy that optimizes every step of the buyer’s journey and drives meaningful business results. This alignment becomes even more achievable with the integration of data, tools, and technology, offering a clear, shared view of how each team’s strategies are performing in one centralized location.
The ML Platform unifies all your data and insights into ML Insights, a combined dataset, which removes silos to align on the accounts most likely to purchase through our MLI Score. Additionally, the platform allows you to seamlessly integrate your sales (CRM) and marketing automation tools (MAP), enabling you to harness insights from campaigns, in-market research, and your pipeline for a comprehensive view of your top accounts. The Madison Logic Platform offers integrations to connect with ABM tools and platforms like Gong, Adobe Marketo, and LinkedIn, further enhancing the synergy between your sales and marketing efforts.
Ready to elevate your ABM strategy? Request a demo today and learn why top marketers choose Madison Logic to maximize the impact of their ABM efforts and drive marketing and sales alignment for success.
