Revenue alignment has moved from concept to practice. It means sales and marketing teams target the same accounts, chase the same goals, and share accountability for pipeline. And going after the same goals means less pipeline anxiety and efficient growth.
The case for revenue alignment is clear: less wasted effort, more predictable pipeline, faster growth. The question is how. Here's what works, based on real experience from teams doing it well.
We asked two practitioners who've built this alignment firsthand.
Thankfully, Director of Evangelism and Customer Marketing at Alyce (a B2B personal gifting platform), Nick Bennett, and his sales counterpart, Christina Nalband, weighed in on our podcast (The First 100 Days) with some of the best sales and marketing alignment best practices that’ll move the needle.
Read on as they talk about why communication is so important to marketing and sales alignment. And how they rely on open, honest communication to get things done.
Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
5 ways to align your sales and marketing teams
Nick Bennett is one of the most well-known field marketers out there. He also has a lot of experience as a founder and brand marketer for B2B SaaS companies.
The same goes for Christina Nalband. She had a decade’s worth of experience in field marketing, where she regularly worked with sales teams before she joined Alyce as a Sales Director.
Here are five practices Nick and Christina use to align their teams and drive measurable pipeline growth.
1. Get your marketers on sales calls
Christine added Nick to her sales team’s call because she believed marketing could create better content for the sales team. This shifted the conversation from pitch to consultation—reps could focus on the buyer's actual gifting process instead of pushing product features.
This gave the sales team an opportunity to focus on why their prospects needed a gifting solution like Alyce in the first place and how they could help with the process. Adopting this practice requires careful planning and buy-in from both teams.Most sales teams may not see the value in adding marketers to their sales calls.
To help both teams understand why this is such a great tactic, outline how the arrangement will benefit each one.
For example, have your marketing team share case studies and reference sheets. The sales team can use these bottom-of-the-funnel content pieces for sales enablement and close more deals.
Show each team how the arrangement helps them hit their numbers. That's how you get buy-in.
2. Define your target market
Before Alyce moved to an account-based marketing strategy, they followed a “spray and pray” business model. They’d send gifts to as many people as possible, hoping to book meetings with a handful of prospects.
While this approach helped them create a pipeline, it didn’t help them to accelerate or grow it. Eventually, they moved to an account-based model and created three account tiers to define their target market.
Within a quarter, they opened almost 60% of the 50 accounts in the first tier. Nick says this shift happened because it enabled the sales team to understand which customers were more likely to convert and direct their efforts accordingly.
This approach is also a great way to save money and effort since it’s more efficient than having the marketing and sales teams make separate lists of accounts to target in an ABM program.
When you define your target market clearly, sales knows exactly which accounts to prioritize—and conversion rates go up.
3. Eliminate silos
Companies often claim to operate without silos. In reality, most organizations struggle with departmental separation. And, if revenue leaders don’t proactively work to identify and eliminate them, their sales initiatives will fail.
When it comes to attaining sales and marketing alignment, leadership should ensure that the sales and marketing teams aren’t siloed from the rest of the company. When this happens, other teams like operations and finance gauge performance and allocate budgets based on fragmented information instead of concrete data.
To prevent this, sales teams can set up ways for other departments to view their data, like a shared Salesforce dashboard.
This gives every team visibility into which sales and marketing activities actually drive pipeline and revenue.
Shared dashboards require additional communication strategies to fully eliminate silos. Here are some other ways you can promote healthy communication and collaboration between your teams:
Use collaboration tools: Project management tools like Trello, Asana, and many others help to keep everybody in the loop and up-to-date on shared projects.
Encourage consistent communication: With open communication, marketing and sales teams will have relevant resources to help them add value to conversations with clients and deliver better customer experiences. Communication tools, like Slack, make it easy for your teams to reach out to each other and have discussions.
Align on goals and responsibilities: Aligning goals and responsibilities between your teams enables them to go after warm leads who are more likely to convert.
4. Schedule regular sales and marketing calls
Christina believes that if you’re not going to have regular calls with your sales or marketing teams, things will fall through the cracks, and your efforts will be misaligned.
Regular communications like a weekly or bi-weekly stand-up will ensure that you do regular course corrections and don’t spend time and effort on activities that aren’t productive.
Expect friction. Any new meeting cadence requires behavior change, and people resist that.
Additional challenges exist.
If you introduce new initiatives like meetings without helping your teams internalize the change, it will be short-lived. Explain the why upfront. Show teams what they'll get out of it.
For example, explain how sales and marketing teams will benefit from the meetings and offer incentives for participation. These could be anything from providing coffee and donuts to conducting meetings over lunches paid for by the company.
Regular communication builds trust. Teams start sharing ideas before they're polished, catching problems early and moving faster.
5. Have difficult conversations
When Christina joined Alyce, she reviewed all the accounts the marketing team was targeting and was surprised to find they weren’t hitting the right ones.
Usually, one team blames the other. Christina didn't. She asked what was broken and how to fix it. Instead of going down that route, Christina had a difficult conversation with Nick about the marketing team’s processes and what they were doing wrong in terms of targeting.
Christina came away with a better understanding of the issues Nick’s team was facing (unexpected turnover, resulting in less staff), and Nick was able to chalk out what his team needed to do to get back on track.
The honest conversation worked. They identified the real problem (understaffing) and built a plan to fix it together.
Promote sales and marketing alignment in your business
Aligning your sales and marketing teams helps both teams understand which prospects they should go after and the sales and marketing activities they should focus on to multiply their revenue.
Sales and marketing alignment delivers:
Better targeting and greater account success
Visibility into the impact that sales and marketing activities have
[Pipeline acceleration](http://"https://www.usergems.com/blog/10-proven-tactics-to-accelerate-your-sales-pipeline ") and growth
UserGems gives your sales and marketing teams:
Automate repeat business by informing them when your active or former champions change their jobs along with their new information
Power your ABM campaigns by giving marketing ownership of the contact discovery while saving SDRs time from manual searching
Drive efficient growth by ensuring sales and marketing go after the same buyers
UserGems tracks when your champions change jobs, then alerts your team with their new contact info and account context—so you can re-engage them and close new deals faster.
