Layoffs, the SVB debacle, skyrocketing interest rates, and the threat of an impending recession. SaaS companies are navigating layoffs, rising rates, and the end of growth-at-any-cost spending. As the market prices in a correction, it seems the days of growth at all costs is over.

Business leaders who don't prioritize efficient growth right now will feel it in the numbers. At UserGems, we believe the key to efficient growth is revenue alignment.

Revenue alignment allows sales and marketing to pursue the same goal, revenue, even if they operate in different departments.

Working with marketing at every stage of the funnel, from lead generation through close, makes your sales reps' lives easier. This is because by going after the same accounts and buyers together, sales and marketing teams can achieve higher conversion rates and more wins without breaking the bank.

Here are three tactics we use internally (and that we’ve seen work for our prospects and customers) to align our sales and marketing teams starting from day one.

Christian Kletzl, CEO & Co-founder of UserGems, and Trinity Nguyen, VP of Marketing at UserGems spoke about overcoming conflicting priorities and limited resources to build efficient growth channels to hit your revenue goals at SaaStr Annual 2022. Watch the video or keep reading for additional insights.

3 practical tips to align and drive efficient growth

Revenue teams in the B2B space know that there’s often friction between marketing and sales teams.

The tension is familiar: sales wants pipeline that converts, marketing is optimising for volume and attribution. Without a shared account list and shared definitions, both teams are technically doing their jobs — and still missing the number.

Unfortunately, all this conflict pulls sales and marketing teams apart, making it harder for them to achieve efficient growth. And in the current market conditions, where teams have to hit ambitious revenue goals with fewer resources, aligning the two teams is more important than ever.

That being said, here’s how we maintain sales and marketing alignment at UserGems.

1. Go after the best buyers together

Getting sales and marketing to pursue the same buyers sounds straightforward. In practice, alignment breaks down quickly without a clear process. We’ve seen a lot of team alignment fall apart at this stage. These steps make it easier to stay aligned:

• Define your ideal customer profile together and stick to it

Going after the best buyers means your sales and marketing team work together to identify their ideal customer profile (ICP) and understand who to target. The criteria for your ICP should include segment, industry, geography, and what kind of tech stack they need to have to make their company a perfect fit for you.

Once your teams agree on an ICP, you can move on to the next step.

• Build a target accounts list that fit these criteria

A lot of companies get to this point and give the list to sales and marketing to execute an ABX strategy.

After this, marketing might end up advertising to the entire list at once because it’s easy and they have the tools to do it. Only to realize a quarter later that the sales team worked on less than half of them.

Or, even worse, you might find out that your sales and marketing teams ended up creating their own target account lists that are completely different from the original.

When sales and marketing teams align on ICP-based target accounts, they achieve measurably higher conversion rates — UserGems customers have seen up to [X]% improvement in pipeline conversion by aligning teams on shared account lists.

• Prioritize the warmest buyers

Once your sales and marketing teams agree on an account list, the next step is to talk about who to target within those accounts.

This involves having sales and marketing teams define their ideal buyer persona together again because it’s essential that the same persona receives the same messaging across all the channels.

At UserGems, we build a list of individuals within those accounts, then layer in buyer signals — job changes, promotions, past product usage — to score and rank outreach priority. Our AI agents use that context to write outreach that's relevant from the first sentence, not just personalised by name.

• We have an existing relationship with
• Who purchased or used our product in the past
• Who recently got hired or promoted
• Internally, we can work through a shared connection — an investor, for example

We go beyond account and ICP selection to pinpoint the specific individuals we want to reach within each account.

Then our sales team reaches out with persona-specific messaging and marketing advertises to the same individuals and  shows them similar ads.

Get Inspired: How B2B marketers can turn customer relationships into new pipeline.

2. Surround prospects all the time, in all channels, throughout the buying process

Buyers rarely respond to a single outreach channel, and most won't reply to cold email alone. That’s why it’s necessary to surround your prospects throughout the buying process and across all channels.

At UserGems, what we do from a sales and marketing perspective in this stage is to have a lot of signals that ultimately add up to a full story. This means making sure that in the short 2 seconds here and there a prospect sees one of our ads, they understand who we are and what we’re doing.

Here’s how we get this done:

• Target prospects with ads and content everywhere

On the sales side, we do all the usual steps of reaching out to our targets via email, LinkedIn, phone calls, and gifting.

And on the marketing side, we make sure that the same people the sales team is reaching out to also see our ads and content, no matter where they go.

So whenever our SDRs or ADEs reach out to anyone, we are 100% sure they’ll see us everywhere, whether they’re scrolling through Instagram or online shopping. This ensures that our brand stays top of mind with anyone considering us as a solution.

That's just to earn a first response. Converting that into an active opportunity takes a separate, sustained effort.

• Use content to nurture leads

We’re very conscious of how we use our content at UserGems. We use it to help the sales team accelerate and close deals faster in two ways.

The first is by using marketing to nurture prospects through the opportunity stages with relevant ads and content.

The second is for marketing to copy the multithread strategy from our sales team to help accelerate deals a little faster. We know no one's making a buying decision alone these days — there’s an average of 7 people on a given buying committee.

So, at UserGems, we have three target personas.

If our sales team is only talking to one persona, we automatically follow the other personas (whether their individuals or teams) so they're aware a deal conversation is in progress and can engage if relevant.

Companies typically incentivize marketers to generate new pipeline rather than accelerate existing opportunities. That brings us to the next step.

3. Align on success metrics for each team to avoid an attribution war

The only way to align sales and marketing throughout the sales process is to incentivize both teams in the same way. Or ensure everyone is measured with the same metrics.

We all know that sales isn’t straightforward. It's hard to say whether this lead came in because someone reached out to them or they saw an ad. Usually, multiple touch points combine to lead to revenue, which is the core goal for sales. In sales, it doesn’t really matter whether a deal is inbound or outbound as long as it’s closed.

But for marketing, attribution is a little trickier. Marketing teams must optimize spend, which makes attribution a higher priority.

Here are some proven strategies to align sales and marketing teams on attribution.

• The UserGems way

Every business is different, so there’s no “right” way to achieve attribution alignment between departments.

But here at UserGems, we define an account with sales activities in the last 90 days as outbound, regardless of how it came in. An account with no activity in the last 90 days counts as inbound. And that also drives the comp incentives.

This approach, shaped by our GTM strategy setup, encourages both teams to work together more consistently.

• Incentivize marketers beyond pipeline generation

If we look at the big picture instead, the only metric that really matters for a business is revenue.

When we incentivize marketers to measure both pipeline generated and revenue, it’s easier to allocate the marketing budget. For example, 80% to generate new pipeline, 10% to accelerate pipeline generation, and 10% for brand awareness.

More companies are now folding their sales development teams into marketing because it’s becoming less important to know whether the last touch was inbound or outbound. This brings the two teams together to work on the same account/ buyer because they’re both 100% responsible for generating top of the funnel leads, allowing sales to focus on closing.

Align sales and marketing teams for efficient growth

Every revenue team's motion looks different — the specifics will vary. Sales and marketing remain challenging disciplines. But you can work together for better, more consistent outcomes by building and maintaining sales and marketing alignment.

At UserGems, our teams go after the best buyers together, surround them with UserGems content and messaging, and then align on attribution. The result: more pipeline, less internal friction, and a team that's actually pulling in the same direction.

Why UserGems

UserGems is the AI command center for outbound and ABM, combining Data Agents, Intelligence Agents, and the AI Chrome Extension to help revenue teams know who to target, what to say, and when to act. UserGems helps B2B sales and marketing teams prioritize the warmest buyers across their target accounts, coordinate outreach across buying groups, and drive pipeline and revenue efficiently.

UserGems backs its platform with a money-back guarantee, so revenue teams can deploy with confidence and start driving pipeline without risk.

Companies like Mimecast, Lattice, Greenhouse, and Medallia use UserGems to hit their pipeline targets.