Marketing and Sales alignment continues to be a hot topic. Misalignment is an expensive problem - costing organizations 10% or more of revenue. There are 4 main reasons why misalignment happens - and here's what you can do about it.

1. Align or Die?
Getting marketing and sales to deliver value for the customer
©2017 Value-ology

2. An unlikely alliance

3. What is alignment?

4. Our definition

5. Less than 40% of firms
believe sales and marketing
are aligned with what
customers want.
Cespedes
6

6. So what?
89% of B2B buyers use the internet during their research process
(Google)
6.8 buyers involved in B2B purchases
(CEB)
67% of buyers have a clear picture of the solution they want before they
engage a sales rep (Sirius Decisions)
94% of customers say they have disengaged with organizations because they are being sent
irrelevant 'content’

7. Organizations that get it right
• Achieve ~32% higher revenue growth
• AND 36% higher customer retention
• AND 208% more revenue from
marketing

8. When marketing and sales
are in sync, organizations
are up to 67% better at
closing deals.
Marketo

9. The 4 reasons for
misalignment

10. 4 reasons for misalignment
Economic
Buy-in
Thought Worlds
Cultural

11. Economic
• Goals
• Compensation
• Budget allocation
• Pricing

12. Cultural
• Values and ideals
• “How we do things
around here”
• “Tribes” within
Marketing:
o Brand
o Event
o Product
o Segment
o Content

13. Thought Worlds
Sales and marketing think in a different way.
- What does success look like?
- What makes a good product or service?
Sales Marketing
1 account – small group of
accounts
An entire market
Short-term Long-term
Customer Product
Opportunity Strategy
Front Lines Behind-the-scenes

14. Buy-in
• Help Sales see the WHY
• How this fits into their
reality
• Involvement in Strategic
Creation
• Positioning for Success

15. How to diagnose the
problem

16. What sets the best organizations apart?
1) Collaborative and Respectful nature of the relationship
• Sales and Marketing collaborate on presenting their plans to the Board and/or Executive leadership
• Marketing provide insights from data/analytics that help sellers position themselves as thought leaders and
deepen relationships with customers
• The social media content put out by both Sales and Marketing is consistent with our brand
• Sales and Marketing share a common language
• Sales and Marketing are seen as an integrated team with clear roles and responsibilities
• Sales and Marketing respect one another
• Sales and Marketing both accept responsibility for poor results without blaming the other
2) The ability to influence upwards in the organization
3) Collection and sharing of intelligent customer information
4) Achieving consistency and integration

17. Diagnosing the problem

18. Check your scorecard
Website Visitors
Leads Captured
Marketing Qualified Leads
Sales Qualified Leads
Customers
Marketing
Sales
Tension
Point

19. Alignment Roadmap
Marketing & Sales
Alignment
Aligned
Customer
Alignment
Road to
Nowhere
Road to hell Rocky Road
ALIGNEDNOTALIGNED
ALIGNEDNOT ALIGNED
Highway to
Heaven

20. Steps to take to fix
alignment

21. The average 6-year old asks
400-700 questions a day.
The average college grad asks
30 questions a day.
Have you attended sales training?
Have you read any sales books?
How often do you talk to sales?

22. Speak the same language
• Agree on Common definitions in your organization:
• Ideal Customer
• Value
• Value Proposition
• Campaign
• Lead

23. Enhance customer understanding
• Meet with customers! Frequently.
• Seek to understand what buyers
find important and why
• Regularly ask sales for customer
feedback and common objections
• Win/Loss Analysis

24. GRRIPS
Theme Action
Goals - Set common 'strategic goals' for marketing and sales
- Integrate tactical goals
Roles - Understand that roles are interlocking and must work in harmony to
achieve success.
- Agree 'duties' and 'rights'
Resources - Ensure resources required to 'get the job done' are understood.
- Develop clear mechanisms for budget requests and allocation.
Information and conversation
flow
- To be aligned to the customer there needs to be a constant flow back
from the market.
- Agree information flow and process for coordination.
Processes - Agree key processes for moving towards goals.
Success Measures - Agree what success looks like.
- Measure against the strategic goals. Make sure top level score cards
are all the same color!

25. Developing an ABM
Program
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach that integrates B2B sales and marketing activity and
communicates with individual prospects or customer accounts as markets of one.

26. What not to do..
• Don’t rush out to reorganize your team
• Don’t just set the same goals
• Don’t just say…
• Macro = Marketing
• Micro= Salesperson
• Don’t think you can’t make an impact!

27. Additional Help to Build
Alignment
Quick assessment tool
FREE download on:
www.shakemktg.com/resources

28. Questions?
www.shakemktg.com
Stacey Danheiser
@shakemktg@shakemktg
Available on Amazon!