What is the state of sales and marketing alignment in the technology industry?

Alignment is improving across the companies I talk to. A number of trends contribute to this: the rise of the chief revenue officer, economy, the unforgiving nature of social media, awareness of the financial rewards by boards and CEOs, and the rise of next generation leaders that have a different mindset around collaboration and shared goals. We still have a long way to go but actions like consolidating sales and marketing ops into one team reporting to the CRO or CFO, marketing carrying a pipeline quota, transparency into what works and what doesn't through big data driven analytics, hybrid teams focused on market segments. The day is rapidly approaching where we will be dropping the titles of sales or marketing because the teams are one, as they should have been from the beginning.

I have some webinars on slideshare via linked in on this topic if you're interested.

In some organizations it is improving, but by and large the issue continues to persist. One of the reasons this is and will continue to be is that alignment itself is not the issue, but a symptom or outcome of larger issues that continue to go unaddressed.

Lot's of money has been made by putting together programs, books, seminars and consulting practices on "aligning sales and marketing." This is akin to treating the fever, but not treating the disease that is causing the fever.

Alignment will continue to persist if organizations do not address a lack of lead management process, lack of shared goals and objectives and a lack of some shared compensation on the meeting of these goals.

Carlos Hidalgo
@cahidalgo

“Alignment” is a noun … a descriptor. A tech company or any other business may claim that its sales and marketing groups have alignment but the proof is in the verbs … what are the groups DOING that demonstrates alignment?

If they are, in fact, collaborating to establish or refine lead definitions and criteria, that indicates alignment. If they create and implement a communication process that deploys the right resources and/or content at the right time under the right circumstances, that also shows alignment.

Conversely, when they create and apply different definitions … especially MQL and SAL … that shows absence of alignment. When marketing tries to replicate or usurp sales’ traditional early roles in customer acquisition and retention (Peter Johnston called it a “land grab”), then that behavior impedes or prevents alignment. MA and RPM are labels, not alignment strategies.

Net: unless and until big minds can outnumber or prevail over big heads in each camp and in the C-suite, the issues in this discussion will continue and perhaps get worse. But if businesses focus on achieving continuity rather than process fragmentation, then we could see some welcome improvement!

As more and and more of marketing goes digital, and companies start investing in marketing automation platforms in order to more effectively target and manage their spend, the sales and marketing divide is exposed. As a result companies have no choice but to face the issue and start working collaboratively between sales and marketing to dovetail their business processes and taxonomy. It's happening in a big way at CSC..

Carlos touches on something that I would say is key in any sort of "alignment" exercise. Shared goals. If Marketing is compensated to drive new leads - that's what they will do. If sales is compensated to sell - that's what they will do. Those two goals are unrelated, and in fact, the notion of driving MORE leads is counterproductive. When we compensate departments on micro initiatives that are seemingly in line with their function - but not the goal of the company as a whole, we create miss-aligned systems - and employees then follow those broken systems. When we distill down the goals of the company and share them amongst all employees we all start working in the same direction.

Here's a real life example. I used to compensate my sales staff on revenue they closed. Net Revenue before internal COGS. I compensated my services team on profit. It was a nightmare. The company goal was profit but we had created a system where sales could under-scope a project to close a deal, but service couldn't meet the scope because it was too lean in terms of hours. We were misaligned in terms of shared goals. We changed to goal to profitability on both sides of the house and scopes came in accurate, work met the time-frame and everyone is happy.

You'll notice this had nothing to do with lead management process because sometimes the problem is bigger than that. As long as organizations refuse to take a hard look at what is causing the problem and put ego aside, the alignment problems we see will continue to persist. Some organizations will get it and others wont. Thank God for the free market economy.

Justin Gray
@myleadmd
http://leadmd.com

I wish I were as optimistic as Christine and Nick! But I don't see much improvement in marketing/sales alignment anywhere on the horizon...

Just look at how frequently the sales/marketing "divide" is discussed among sales and marketing professionals on Focus, LinkedIn, etc... These topics always get lots (sometimes hundreds) of posts — but zero agreement, even on the basics of what marketing is or is supposed to accomplish that's different from sales. Still, 100% of those "professionals" will each swear that they have the correct understanding.

And so, the status quo just continues to get more so.

Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com

I agree, Michael! Well said.

From a European perspective , I would say it varies. Why should tech be any different to any other industry? Sales and Marketing Alignment is like the British weather, which you know is always sunny. It only rains on tourists.

@Justin hit the nail on the head IMO. Sales is an individual sport, marketing is a team sport. One of my favorite quotes is from Jon Miller of Marketo. He said "The difference between sales and marketing is that with sales you can easily measure results, but not activities. With marketing, you can easily measure activities but not results".

Marketing's desperate need to quantify results often leads to under valuing its contribution. If a company closed $100M, why does marketing try and determine how much of that $100M it sourced/affected? By looking at Marketing's contribution as a percentage of closed sales, Marketing managers are short changing their value.

To close $100M a company probably had to have the potential "marketing value" of $500M. That's the number Marketers should be using and quit harping on trying to get sales to "sit down and agree" to useless lead definitions so they can lay claim to a percentage of closed sales. Get smart, sell your own numbers!