Mandy Hornaday: Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Hornaday, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence, and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey everyone, welcome to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Hornaday. And today we're going to be talking about sales and marketing alignment and how to build a customer-centric growth engine through having that strong alignment. And truth be told, I was even hesitant to do this as one of my first few episodes because I feel like sales and marketing alignment is so heavily discussed in today's marketplace. But the thing is, we are still getting it wrong. Lack of sales and marketing alignment is still a huge pain point for go-to-market organizations today. In fact, according to Forrester, only 8% of companies have achieved strong alignment between their sales and marketing teams.
Mandy Hornaday: And I see this happen every day across different teams. And it comes up in a lot of different ways, whether sales and marketing don't describe their ideal customer in the same way, or they don't have an orchestrated prospecting plan where they're going after the same accounts in a coordinated way, or marketing leads go untouched by sales because they think that they suck, or they don't have time to follow up with them. And I've personally experienced both scenarios, one where we didn't have strong sales and marketing alignment. I would say we were aligned, but not in sort of an optimal way. And then I've seen where sales and marketing is in lockstep and we feel like a unified growth team as opposed to two siloed teams who are generally working in the same direction for similar goals. And frankly, today, we just don't have the luxury of being inefficient and wasting time and money and resources. And a lot of times that's what happens when sales and marketing aren't aligned. And with all of the budget cuts that are happening and marketing resources being cut and us being expected to do more with less, now more than ever, we need to be a unified growth team that is working towards unified goals.
Mandy Hornaday: And outside of anecdotally feeling better when sales and marketing is aligned and having just general efficiency and optimization, I'll share that according to Review42, when sales and marketing teams are aligned, we are 67% more efficient at closing deals, and we have 38% higher sales win rates. We have a 36% increase in customer retention, and then of course, higher customer lifetime value as a result of that. We often save 30% on average on customer acquisition costs, and overall teams will experience a 27% increase of faster profit growth. And so while it is such a no-brainer for us to be focused on creating sales and marketing alignment across the entire customer journey, a lot of people don't even know what it looks like, what we should be striving for, especially if they've never experienced sales and marketing alignment, which despite how important it is, feels somewhat rare in today's market.
Mandy Hornaday: And so when I think about sales and marketing alignment, I think about us creating a unified growth organization where we have a shared system of communication, a shared strategy, and shared goals that enable both sales and marketing to create the best customer experience possible. And truthfully, every function has an important part to play in the entire customer journey, whether it's sales or marketing or the biz dev team. And what we need to be focused on is figuring out how each of those functions come together to achieve growth, and really identifying what are the specific roles and responsibilities that we all play in the growth journey. And so today I wanted to share five different areas of alignment. If you're looking to create sales and marketing alignment in your organization, either from scratch or to get stronger at it, I've put together five different ways that I've seen success in terms of creating alignment within the go-to-market organization. Let's dive in.
Mandy Hornaday: One of the first areas that is most important and also maybe most obvious to create alignment on is our go-to-market goals. And while I feel as though this is an obvious one, the reality is that so many of us are so focused on our marketing attribution model and our marketing KPIs, which I totally understand because we're, you know, fighting to prove ROI, that we end up losing sight of the bigger picture. I personally experienced this a few years ago when I built a pretty complex multi-touch attribution model for the marketing department I was running. And it was such an important step for us in the maturation of our department because we were finally able to associate impact and ROI to the marketing efforts that we were putting forward. And while that was so important, what I noticed started to happen in the coming months and frankly in the years to follow was that the attribution model actually ended up pitting us against the other functions in the growth team. You know, it felt like we created this weird dynamic where the BDR team and the sales team were fighting for credit for what they were doing and didn't necessarily wanna attribute success to marketing activities. And if anything, it ended up siloing us more from the organization.
Mandy Hornaday: Have you ever experienced that? Have you personally found that sales has just this tight hold on quote unquote credit? And you know, I get it. I've learned over the years that great salespeople tend to have these hunter mindsets and they wanna feel responsible for what they've gone out and they've killed and they've brought back home. And while I understand that, and while we wanna lean into that, the reality is in order for us to break down the silos on the growth team, I believe the first thing we need to do is unify under the same vision and use the same metrics for success. And so the first step is to tie your marketing goals to revenue. Once you have a shared revenue goal with the sales team and the entire go-to-market organization, work backwards and come up with the KPIs that make the most sense in order to drive those growth goals. And what I'm not talking about is MQLs. I'm talking about impactful KPIs that will actually drive revenue. So whether it's demos booked or discovery calls booked, let's make sure that our leads and our prospecting efforts are actually converting into real sales activities.
Mandy Hornaday: I'd also encourage you to make sure that you've got shared definitions around these metrics. Don't just call it demos booked. Is it demos booked or is it the meetings that actually took place? Let's make sure we've got shared language around the metrics and the KPIs that we are reporting on. And I think this is so important because I've heard countless CROs in my time tell me how frustrated the sales teams get when marketing is reporting to them all of this success and we're using metrics that don't really mean anything to them like an MQL. Sometimes they don't even know what that is or how we're defining what an MQL is. And so in order to keep the engagement and the collaboration high, we need to have a unified set of growth metrics that we're all going after and we're rowing in unison on in order to achieve. So while it's an obvious one, I can attest to the fact that so many growth organizations don't employ this methodology at the current moment. So get aligned on your go-to-market goals, first and foremost.
Mandy Hornaday: The second major area to create sales and marketing alignment is actually on our customers, and not just who they are, but also how we're prioritizing going after them. And so in today's world, what I see most often is that companies loosely have an ICP defined, but when you ask different teams or different functions who their ICP is, different departments will respond with different things or describe the ICP in different ways. Or frankly, even if you are aligned, sometimes the ICP definition is so basic because people don't wanna limit themselves and they wanna go after as many companies as they can. And what I would say to that is, we all just need to do our jobs better to resonate with the target audience that is most likely to buy our product or service. And it feels a bit like a cop-out and an unproductive one at that to keep our ICP really broad.
Mandy Hornaday: And so the first thing I would challenge you to do to create more sales and marketing alignment with our customers is to get aligned on your targeting and your qualification criteria. Pull those ICPs out, revisit them, get more specific beyond your typical firmographics of industries or company size or geographies. Go deeper, talk to sales and figure out which leads get them really excited and which leads make them feel like, oh, this is not gonna go anywhere, right? Let's identify what those red flags and those green flags are and adjust our ICP and our targeting to go along with that. And once you have a more descriptive ICP that is not just trying to talk to everyone everywhere, the second thing you want to do is align on a prioritization strategy. If you have 100,000 companies in your ICP, certainly you're not going to go after all of those at once. You only have the bandwidth and the ability and the resources to go after a portion of that really well. And so it's also critical to make sure that marketing, sales, your BDR teams, everyone is aligned on your prioritization strategy within your ICP. Which segments are you going to go after first? Which signals and data points might be most interesting to signal that we should be jumping on an account? Whether your ideal customer just received funding or whether they're hiring for an ideal role or whether they just launched a new product or a service into a new market and can now benefit from your solution.
Mandy Hornaday: There are so many different ways that you can prioritize your ICP and who you'll go after and when, but what's important and what's most critical is that you're aligned with your growth team on your prioritization strategy. And frankly, I will do a future episode on this because I know there's a fear of if we go narrow and if we're in complete lockstep on the accounts we're going after between sales, marketing, and biz dev that we'll end up inundating our customers and creating a poor customer experience. And instead, we really want to create the omnichannel experience and the orchestration of all of those teams coming together really strongly to create an amazing customer experience that has really high conversion rates. But in the meantime, start working together with your sales team to figure out how you're prioritizing your ICP.
Mandy Hornaday: And as you're thinking about alignment on your customers, the last thing I'd urge you to think about is your segmentation strategy. Now, a lot of times marketing and sales, and frankly even CS, have different ways of segmenting your customers within your ICP. And that's okay. You know, marketing a lot of times wants to segment our campaigns by personas and by the pain points different personas have. Whereas sales may actually segment based on a company size or the location of the company. But regardless of how each team is segmenting, the most important thing is to make sure you have a plan to align your campaign segments with the sales handoff process. So if you're running campaign segments towards personas or to industries, and if sales segments by company size, make sure that you're pulling in the company size as a data point and enriching your account data before you hand off that lead to sales so that you have a clear owner when you are handing off the customer lead. And as we wrap up the second point creating alignment across our customers, I just would urge you to make sure you don't skip this step. It's so easy for all of us to think that sales and marketing have the same definition for their ICP because we created a shared document years ago. But it's incredibly likely that your sales team has adopted their own red flags and green flags within the account and prioritization signals that we, from a marketing perspective, just aren't aware of. So please, I urge you, take number two seriously and do the work here.
Mandy Hornaday: All right, number three, creating sales and marketing alignment across the entire customer journey. So one of the biggest mistakes I see marketing leaders making today is that we're not looking at the entire buyer journey anymore and we're stopping once we've driven in our MQLs and we've sort of thrown them over the fence and we've passed off the baton and now we feel like it's sales' job to close the customers. And frankly, if you're still stuck on an old attribution model, I get it, right? If we're not going to be able to take credit for something, quote unquote, credit for something, why bother? But this is a huge mistake. And frankly, if we were focused on revenue as opposed to these marketing KPIs, we would be prompted to look at the entire customer journey and figure out how to create a better experience for the customer. And what I see that happens oftentimes when marketing isn't looking at the entire customer journey is that the customer journey is built and prioritized for sales as opposed to the actual customers. And of course, that should be flipped. The customer should be at the center of everything. And so as marketing, we need to be the voice of the customer.
Mandy Hornaday: And so of course, one of the first steps is to actually document your customer journey and figure out what happens at each stage, who owns what within your go-to-market organization, who are the different buyers that are involved in those stages, and what are they looking to get out of each of those stages? But tactically speaking, I feel like there's three big elements when you're looking at the customer journey. And the first one is your prospecting orchestration. And we talked about that a little bit in aligning on the customer, but making sure that we are all orchestrating efforts between marketing, BDRs, and AEs when we are prospecting, and we're creating a really powerful prospecting experience for our customers where they don't feel inundated, but they feel like they're seeing us and experiencing our brand everywhere, and they wanna know more. The second big element I'd look at throughout the customer journey is the messaging that we're putting in front of the customer. Are sales and marketing using the same differentiators and the same positioning and messaging statements? Are we aligned on what we're saying to the customer and when and how we're saying it? And if you have a strong product marketing team within your organization, hopefully you are doing this well. But if you don't have a strong product marketing team, pay attention to this portion, start to dive in and figure out how sales is talking about your product or your service and how your marketing team is, and where you're aligned and where you're misaligned.
Mandy Hornaday: And in partnership with that, I would say the third big element to consider is the sales enablement function. And so once you've outlined your entire customer life cycle and you know the pain points and the questions that your prospects are asking at the different stages and you've identified what they need in order to feel comfortable and confident to move forward with you in your buying cycle, we need to be creating sales enablement that will solve for those prospects' needs in a way that sales will actually use and benefit from. And so while the customer needs to be our main focus in this entire process, I find we also need to be having empathy for the sales team. And so I would ask you, when was the last time you listened to sales calls? When was the last time you dove into a win-loss analysis? Are you really in tune to why customers are dropping out of the buying process with your solution? And I will say, this is probably one of the beefiest steps out of all of these steps. It's a lot of work to align on the customer journey, especially if you're selling to enterprise and you've got a really long, extensive sales cycle. The more expensive your product is, the more complex the sales process is, the harder this is gonna be, but also the more and more important this is gonna be. So as you work to create alignment across the entire customer journey, please just keep in mind that the customer needs to be at the center of all of this.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, wonderful. So number four, creating sales and marketing alignment on pipeline planning. So how many of you create your goals outside of sales today? Anyone? I know I've personally done this before. I've, you know, when I had the old attribution model and like, yeah, we're contributing to 30% of the company revenue. Now the company wants to grow by 25%. So that means I need to grow by 25% from a marketing perspective, right? And it wasn't until I moved into the head of growth operations at a B2B SaaS startup that I really started to dive deeper into pipeline planning and becoming a lot more strategic with how we were setting our goals. And so the first thing I would encourage you to do is figure out how much pipeline do you need as a business, not just as a marketing team, but as a growth team in order to hit your revenue goals. And so this is where a bottoms-up marketing plan would be really impactful. If you don't know what that is, that's okay. I'm gonna have a future episode on building a bottoms-up marketing plan, but essentially you'll work backwards from your revenue goal. Apply all of the different stages that you have as a part of your buying process and their conversion rates, and you'll work backwards to figure out how much pipeline and therefore leads do you need.
Mandy Hornaday: Once you know how much pipeline you need, don't stop there. The second thing to figure out is your pipeline coverage plan. And so while sales is certainly in charge of creating their own sales territory assignments, we as strategic marketing leaders need to be thinking about if we're launching new products or we're going into new markets or we're launching new campaigns in order to drive pipeline, who is going to cover that pipeline once it comes in? Now, I'm certainly not saying we should be making the decision on that, but it is something that is critical for you to get sales and marketing alignment on because the last thing you want to do and one of the most inefficient things we can do is generating pipeline that our sales team isn't actually going to be able to pick up and take on. Which leads into the second piece you wanna think about, which is your pipeline capacity for both your AEs and your BDRs. So how much pipeline can a salesperson handle at each stage? Once you know how much pipeline each AE or BDR can handle, we need to make sure how much pipeline holistically can the team handle.
Mandy Hornaday: And the way I like to personally think about this is almost like a manufacturing line. So if you think about building toys and you've got people at the start who are starting to build the toys, and then you've got the people in the middle who are potentially putting them in boxes, and then you've got the people at the end who are shipping them out, right? Just super basic example here. But everyone needs to be working in tandem. If you've got too many people in the middle and not enough packages coming, people are just standing around, not doing anything. If you've got too many toys, but not enough people packaging, then you've got toys that aren't being able to go out the door, right? And so I think of pipeline in a very similar way. We need to be strategic with how much pipeline we're creating, who's going to cover it, and what type of capacity do they have to cover it. And frankly, if this concept is new for you, it's okay. Just start with a bottoms-up marketing plan and start to get your arms around how much pipeline your business needs in order to achieve the growth goals you have set forward for the year. That's a great place to start.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay, number five, creating sales and marketing alignment on growth operations. So last but certainly not least, we have to have a strong growth machine in place for the entire customer journey to run smoothly. It's amazing to leverage technology and AI and automation where you can. But this step is all about making sure that we've got strong lead qualification and handoff workflows. Right? Are we creating a seamless handoff experience for our prospects when marketing does what they need to do to drive in interest, and then we hand it over to sales in order for sales to pick that up? Is that a clunky part of your customer process for you? If so, how can you make it better? And I think one of the areas I would just encourage you to look into is, if you've done the work of step number two in terms of aligning on your customer and the prioritization criteria and the qualification criteria, make sure that you are stringently looking at the leads that you're driving in before handing them to sales. I know that sometimes it's easier to just have automations that trigger as soon as the lead comes in and we hand it over to sales, but frankly what I've personally found is that that will hurt your reputation with sales. If you're not driving in high quality leads that they want to talk to right now, they'll take their time getting back to those leads, or they won't at all. In my experience, this solves itself when we are critically qualifying the leads before we hand them over to sales. And if they don't match the qualification criteria that sales wants today, throw them into a nurture campaign, right? Just because they may not be right for us today, we still wanna be building a strong brand and future pipeline with potential prospects down the road.
Mandy Hornaday: Another way that you can create sales and marketing alignment through growth operations is to have a unified data and reporting strategy. And so a lot of this is aligned to having the same goals and KPIs. Do we have a shared reporting system where we all have visibility to each stage in the customer journey, how the different metrics are defined, and what we're monitoring from start to finish? I've personally seen that when teams don't have a strong RevOps function that exists in their team, a lot of times sales and marketing have different data and reporting strategies. And we are using different dashboards, we're monitoring different metrics, we might even define the same metrics differently. And it just creates a lack of trust and frankly lack of visibility amongst the two teams. We're sort of rowing in a similar direction, but we're not on the same boat. And so think about your unified data and reporting strategy, which leads into my next step of something to consider, which is your unified go-to-market tech stack. You know, I am all for tools and technologies and having a really strong tech stack. And I know marketing and sales have their own that they really care about. But what I would encourage you to think about is, are we tracking our customer data across all of those tools and platforms in a unified environment and in a unified way? What is your single source of truth on the customer and on the experience they're having? Do you have one? Or do you have just a bunch of disparate systems that have incredibly important information and engagement metrics about your customers, but they're all sitting in siloed environments?
Mandy Hornaday: And while I still maintain that building the customer journey in our earlier steps is probably the most comprehensive step, getting aligned on your growth operations is probably one of the most complex steps, especially if you don't have really tech savvy people on your team. Hopefully you have a marketing ops function that can do a lot of this heavy lifting for you. Or even better, if you have a RevOps function that can really bring the two teams and their two tech stacks together. But I would urge you to start working through creating unified growth operations wherever you can. And if you need to start somewhere, start with the lead qualification and handoff workflows. Make sure that it's a smooth handoff for your customer and that pipeline isn't getting lost.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey, wonderful. So to recap, the five key areas that I've found success in terms of creating sales and marketing alignment across the customer journey include, number one, having really strong, unified go-to-market goals. Number two, having a unified view of who your customer is and how we're prioritizing going after them. Number three, having a unified view of the customer journey and keeping the customer at the heart of the journey. Number four, having a unified view of pipeline planning. And number five, having unified growth operations. Now, all five of these I have found are critical to creating really strong alignment for sales and marketing teams.
Mandy Hornaday: But I also purposely built these five steps in a way that could be considered to be top down. So if you're starting from scratch or you don't have a great relationship with the sales team right now, or maybe you have a great relationship with sales, but you're still not working or collaborating in the way that you know would create so much more revenue growth and efficiency across the entire organization, I would encourage you to start at number one and work your way through to create alignment over the next few months and or frankly a year. You know, this takes time. It takes time to build really strong trust and respect and collaboration between these two teams. And it starts at the top with you as the marketing executive and with your sales executive, and really having the shared commitment together to partnering and working through building this alignment together. And regardless of how you and your sales partner decide to approach sales and marketing alignment, whether you use these five steps or whether you build your own, it's just most important that you align on the vision together and you build a shared path of how to get there.
Mandy Hornaday: And certainly the last thing I'd leave you with is that communication is key here. So whatever you decide to do when you partner with your sales leader, make sure to implement regular syncs and reviews and feedback loops to keep the conversation going. You're not going to build this overnight and certainly it's going to take some time, but keep the conversation going, set up the cadence to have those conversations, and just keep getting better each month. All right. I hope this episode was helpful today. I know it's a conversation that is being had so often out there, but I can honestly say that so many of us still have so much work to do when it comes to building strong sales and marketing alignment for our go-to-market organizations. And so I hope that you're able to take any of these steps and put them into practice and see an increase in your growth and efficiency. And if you haven't already, would you do me a huge favor and consider subscribing to the show so we can keep the conversation going together? It would just mean so much to me. Okay, everyone, thanks for your time today. And as always, keep activating growth for you and your business. Talk soon.
