The idea of sales enablement and a harmonious sales and marketing team is something I’ve experienced more than once in my career, which is rare. I’ve been fortunate to be in organizations where we focus on the end goal and not just attribution. Attribution is one of the things that can make or break the sales and marketing relationship. Add in partners and you’ve got a real bidding war on who gets comped.

For the first four years of my career, my main focus was creating content with a clear strategy and plan. I never had the privilege of sitting with our customers and hearing about their pain points or hanging out with BDR and sales teams to fully hear insights from our buyers.

Creating a lot of in-the-weeds, engaging content might appeal to your stakeholders, but it only sometimes resonates with your prospective customers.

This one of the driving factor for me switching for brand side, I made it a huge focus to flip that script. I started my role by reading customer success stories, listening to recorded qualification and demo calls, and just picking the sales team minds.

On the brand side, with ISVs, I’ve focused so much of my career on finding out what makes my sales counterparts tick and then working alongside them to achieve those goals. Marketing goals are great and all, but if you are still reporting TOF metrics to your sales team, maybe you are missing the mark.
Sales wants contacts ready to move from a discovery into a demo/consultative status. Why not work towards the same metrics and speak the same language? In modern marketing and sales enablement, you have to think like this!

I’ve also been in organizations where sales and marketing are not on the same page. And it shows! The funnel is clogged and leaking. We are missing opportunities because of mis-connections. Reminder that from 2010 craigslist? That’s your B2B marketing funnel when you don’t have alignment. So how do you do it? How to you align sales and marketing?

The rest is still unwritten – FEEL THE RAIN ON YOUR SKIN —- no, but really! Here are a few of my ideas or thoughts:
+What about one revenue team in your reporting structure?
+Are you going beyond the ‘deal review’ meetings?
+Do you have joint goals and KPIs you both review BUT also agree with?
+Is your comp plan or at least business plan aligned?
+Do you have shared systems and a tech stack that syncs across the contact to customer landscape?

Those are just a few things to consider when building an aligned sales and marketing go-to-market strategy.