In this guide I’m going to share with you a step-by-step process of achieving operational marketing and sales alignment. It is the same process we used to transform siloed business units into one revenue team working on the same goals in B2B companies ranging from 50 to 5000 employees.

You’ll learn:

• Why sales and marketing work in silos and 13 signs of marketing and sales misalignment
• How to achieve fundamental GTM strategy alignment
• How to achieve execution alignment: joint marketing and sales playbooks
• How to go from siloed business units to integrated full-funnel marketing and sales teams

Let’s dive in.

Why do sales and marketing work in silos?

In most B2B companies sales and marketing work in silos. They have different goals and objectives, run different campaigns and target different audiences.

Usually, there are 2 reasons why this happens: historical sales-led growth and/or lack of clearly defined marketing role in the organization. 

Because of the second reason, companies hire junior inexperienced marketers and put them under sales wings. Marketing function becomes sales assistant and order-taker.

In these companies, sales has a dominant role and thinks that marketing is all about:

• Creating slide decks
• Writing and publishing corporate press releases and blog content
• Hanging out on social media and running ads
• Organizing events
• Taking care of visuals making everything «look nicer»

Sales don’t believe that marketing can drive pipeline and revenue, and consider it a fancy add-on to sales operations.

CRO usually replaces CMO, but that switch leads to dramatic consequences: making marketing a lead generation function.

Marketing activities are usually limited to:

• gated e-books to get contacts that are transferred to sales as leads
• landing pages that promote demo calls without giving an idea of what the product is all about, price, use cases, etc.
• writing scripts and setting up automated cadences for SDRs
• «feature-oriented» content to «sell» the product
• webinars that are wrapped as educational events but in but are pure product pitches.

This set up doesn’t work and leads to burning out marketers, and destroying marketing function

The marketing and sales misalignment problem can’t be fixed by replacing CMO and putting marketing under CRO.

The problem will be solved only when a company has a clear definition of a marketing role and has an alignment on Go-To-Market Strategy.

Let’s discuss it.

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Role of marketing in B2B companies

B2B marketing is NOT sales and is NOT lead generation. Nor should it have the role of sales order-takers.

B2B marketing has a strategic role, is done across the full funnel and should:

• Generate awareness and demand in your target market to source pipeline with inbound opportunities.
• Help sales with demand capturing and supply sales with engaged accounts for further prospecting, nurturing, and activation.

Here are the core areas that the marketing function should be in charge of.

1. GTM strategy.

Marketing is responsible for:

• Market segmentation and priority verticals
• ICP (ideal customer profile) based on detailed customer insight and analysis
• Buyer journey and how to influence it
• Positioning and messaging
• Priority channels, partners and communities
• Marketing program and content to drive awareness and generate demand
• Blended attribution model and individual metrics to measure different campaigns performance
• Consistent alignment with senior leadership and sales on points above

2. Generate brand awareness and demand across the full funnel.

Marketing should be in charge of brand awareness and demand generation programs, but not the way sales-led organizations think.

Here are 3 main areas marketing should be responsible for:

• Run brand awareness and demand generation campaigns (organic thought leadership, podcast, webinars, guest posting, etc.) in selected verticals and channels
• Create content aligned with the buyer journey (from awareness to sales enablement)
• Set up nurturing programs (paid and organic) to generate demand from target accounts that are not currently buying

3. Demand capturing.

Too many companies misunderstand demand capturing thinking that it is all about running direct ads and outbound emails.

Demand capturing means:

• Set up an engagement threshold and intent data tracking to capture accounts that demonstrate high interest in your product
• Run retargeting and activation campaigns with sales
• Provide frictionless experience for inbound leads

Example of capturing engaged account

4. Sales and buyer enablement.

Marketing should create content that can accelerate the sales cycle and pre-address all potential questions and concerns of prospects, like:

• Budget justification and ROI
• Vertical use cases and results
• Migration & security
• Comparison reports, etc.

5. Orchestrating and executing with sales revenue programs.

This includes:

• Create clear playbooks and explain the role of sales in every playbook – I’ll explain them in detail below.
• Collect feedback from sales about marketing plans and programs, and mitigate all concerns before launching any program
• Train and onboard everybody who is involved in the program execution

6. Marketing performance analysis and revenue reporting.

What you don’t measure, you can’t control.

Marketing is in charge of analyzing the performance of all marketing programs to refine messaging, content, targeting, (dis)qualification criteria, and campaign playbooks together with sales.

Also, marketing is in charge of filling in the revenue report to show marketing-sourced revenue and the impact on the sales velocity. Marketing-sourced revenue (not ‘influenced’) – inbound opportunities that are won by sales.

But what if sales and marketing still don’t work together despite being aligned with the points I’ve mentioned above?

Here are 14 root reasons.

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14 root causes of marketing and sales misalignment

1. Lack of customer research. 

Marketing and sales have their own hypotheses of the buying journey: how and why customers buy. These hypotheses are often very far from reality. 

As a result, the efficiency of marketing and sales processes is reasonable and highly dependent on individuals.

2. Vague and broad ICP.

One fundamental mistake in B2B marketing comes from B2C — developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) the way B2C companies do it.

In B2C you are selling to a concrete person:

Mary Jane, 45 years old, mom of two kids, lives in New Jersey, loves Tony Robbins, wants to be fit.

You end up with a broad group of women who fit these criteria. Your goal is to target them all with a commodity product.

In B2B you’re selling to multiple verticals that have different needs and reasons to buy.

You can’t sell to «all startups from New Jersey that raised money recently».

The higher is your product ACV and the more complex is the sales process, the more specific and focused should be your target addressable market.

When developing ICP for a B2B company, you need to work on 5 pillars:

1. Firmographics
2. Buying committee structure
3. Account qualification and disqualification criteria
4. Account segmentation
5. Account enrichment and buyer journey

3. Messaging and value prop are not targeted, specific and validated with ICP.

Because of broad ICP and broad targeting, marketers create an industry-agnostic marketing message that doesn’t resonate with their buyers. The message is usually broad and vague. But the worst thing is that it is never validated with their buyers. 

Platforms like Wynter allow you to get on-demand feedback from target B2B customers. Companies that do message validation see up to 73% more demos and signups. 

4. Misaligned messaging in ads and landing pages copy sets up wrong expectations for prospects and generates low-quality leads.

If marketing promises one thing in ads, landing page copy focuses on a different thing, and sales reps talk about different values during the demo, this set up is doomed. From ads to the final conversation, both teams should be aligned on what to say to a specific group of buyers.

5. Marketing and sales target different market segments, geomarkets, or ICP.

This is a typical example of work in silos. 

6. Marketing focuses on vanity metrics and has different KPIs than sales.

When sales have sales quota pressure and outbound KPIs, any new join program with marketing feels like a burden that distracts them from the primary goal.

This goes even more extreme in companies where sales don’t hit revenue quota and see how marketing celebrates hitting MQLs.

Let’s quickly nail down what MQLs are.

MQLs are not-sales-ready contacts that fit your ICP and demonstrate a specific level of engagement (visited high-intent pages on your website, signed up for a product webinar, etc).

You can use MQLs for:

• Progressive profiling: collecting more info about needs, goals, and priorities.
• Tier segmentation
• Sourcing relevant ABM warm-up campaign after qualification.

But never transfer MQLs to sales for further activation, add them to the automated outbound cadence, or measure marketing performance by # of MQLs.

7. There are no clear playbooks for lead handoff and activation processes.

Here is how SDR who works for our client described this issue.

“I open Salesforce in the morning and see a new account assigned to me with a note – “this account hit our lead score and was transferred to sales. I have no idea what this company clicked on or how it appeared in our CRM. Neither I understand what I supposed to do next: call them? Send an email and suggest to book a demo?”

8. Marketing campaigns are not tied to revenue and don’t contain a clear list of tasks, responsibilities, and timelines.

No one in sales wants to do “demand gen”, “ABM”, “content distribution”, or help with any other marketing campaign if they don’t clearly see how:

• The campaign will impact the pipeline and revenue.
• Their responsibilities and tasks
• Program timeline

9. Marketing doesn’t run demand generation programs.

Ask any SDR what kind of help from marketing they’d like to get, and you’ll hear:

“We want them to make our target accounts aware of our product and value proposition”.

Demand generation is not a bunch of organic and paid tactics.

Demand generation is being presented in the channels your buyers use for research and education and provide expert, top-notch content aligned with their interests and questions.

10. Marketing creates SEO-based content that ignores the buyer journey and buyer’s informational needs.

Many B2B marketers think about content marketing as a game of numbers:

more articles -> more keywords + longtails -> more traffic -> more revenue.

These marketers miss one point:

The goal of the content is not generating traffic but generating demand and inbound opportunities.

Also, keep in mind, that no sales rep will ever promote or distribute the content that will make them look amateur.

The quality of content in complex B2B outweighs the quantity.

Focusing on providing comprehensive answers to your buyers’ challenges generates more opportunities than generic top-of-the-funnel articles for the high-traffic keyword.

11. Marketing doesn’t care about pipeline progress.

If marketing doesn’t communicate regularly with sales to discuss pipeline development and collaborate on increasing opportunities and closing deals, sales may perceive that marketing doesn’t value generating revenue.

Hence, what’s the point of collaborating with them?

12. There are no regular pipeline review, campaign progress and postmortem meetings.

There are multiple reasons why marketing and sales don’t work together. But one of them is not having a regular cadence of sync & campaign review meetings with a clear agenda.

Define core joint campaigns. Create a clear agenda. Make sure both teams come prepared.

This always leads to innovation and practical solutions to drive revenue.

13. Sales have protective mindset

Sales believe their core asset is their network. Hence, they are unwilling to share contacts or make intros assuming their relationship can be “stolen”.

14. Marketing has no product and market expertise.

Sales might view marketing as an “arts and crafts department” if they observe that marketing lacks a clear understanding of the target market, product value, ideal customer profile (ICP), and competition.

These root reasons cause the sales and marketing misalignment.

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13 signs of marketing and sales misalignment.

Before we’ll move to the marketing and sales alignment process, I want to address one of the most common questions:

How to notice the signs of marketing and sales misalignment?

Here is a checklist for you.

• Lack of awareness in target accounts (measured by regular complaints from sales or lost reasons are “lost to competitor”)

• Sales reject MQLs

• Marketing becomes an order-taker (marketing function turns into sales assistance function, executing tasks coming from sales and running lead gen campaigns)

• Commodity positioning (company/brand falls down into either commodity or “yet another spammy vendor” category)

• Dependence on cold outreach to drive pipeline

• Long sales cycles

• Low win-rates

• Most leads are not sales-ready

• Blaming games between marketing and sales

• Low conversion from MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) to SQOs (sales-qualified opportunities)

• Marketing collateral collects dust

• Multiple versions of value prop. There are many versions of positioning and value proposition. Different sales people come up with their own versions.

• Miserable marketing-sourced pipeline

If you ticked any of the boxes, check the diagram below to see the root causes you need to fix.

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2 levels of marketing and sales alignment: Go-To-Market and Execution.

There are 2 levels of marketing and sales alignment: fundamental (GTM Strategy) and execution (joint programs).

Fixing misalignment and silos starts from agreeing on fundamentals.

Let’s cover them first.

GTM Strategy Fundamental Alignment 

Here is a list of fundamentals both marketing and sales should agree on before planning any joint programs.

• Analysis of current challenges and bottlenecks
• Goals and objectives
• Joint programs to handle the bottlenecks and achieve the goals
• KPIs and target metrics
• Priority market segments
• ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
• Tier segmentation criteria
• Account qualification and disqualification criteria
• Account scoring for account prioritization
• Buying committee structure
• Buyer journey
• Vertical positioning and value proposition
• Value proposition for different buying committee members

I won’t describe each of the points in detail, because we have already covered them in the GTM Strategy guide. The only thing I’d like to mention, that the real work only starts when you achieve fundamental Go-To-Market alignment.

The real marketing and sales alignment happens not on papers but when B2B marketers jump into the trenches with sales and help with generating revenue. 

Which leads us to the next level of alignment.

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Execution alignment

Let’s cover how both teams can work together to create awareness, generate demand and drive the revenue.

1. Foundation.

Here are 3 things that should be in place before marketing and sales start running joint programs.

1. Shared list of accounts that fit ICP.

Marketing targets the same list of accounts as sales. The list is vetted, enriched, and qualified. No “wish lists” or “dead deals“.

The account list should strictly fit ICP.

2. Reports with target metrics and KPIs.

Marketing and sales fill in the same revenue report.

It’s extremely important that both teams:

• Have the same KPIs
• Measure their success by revenue generated and opportunities created with target accounts
• Host regular pipeline and campaign review meetings (we’ll cover them below).

When the fundamentals are in place, both teams can start the execution of full funnel revenue operations.

Below I’ll cover core joint programs from awareness to activation stages.

2. Account-based awareness and demand generation.

While awareness and demand generation are core marketing functions (we described in detail B2B demand generation function and different programs here), sales should be involved as well.

Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Reposition themselves as trusted advisors, not just SDRs nobody wants to talk to.

2. Attract the attention of target accounts and increase the reply rate

3. Generate multiple opportunities to start conversations with the target buyers

Key joint programs.

• Thought leadership and multithreaded engagement with target accounts.
• Co-hosting with marketing podcasts and webinars
• Engagement with target communities
• Content distribution to start conversations with target buyers
• Demand generation ads: targeting the buying committee of target accounts with your top-performing educational content.
• Connecting with the buying committee members from target accounts and building relationship with peers.

The last point is usually not obvious. A lot of marketers ask me what’s the point of connecting to marketing peers at target accounts?

The first reason is that your peers are in your shoes. Often, they can share with you insider information about key initiatives, decision-makers, their goals and needs. You can leverage this information to personalize your campaigns and share it with sales.

Another reason is doing content/marketing collaboration with the target account to boost awareness and strengthen a relationship. Often, your peers because of collaboration would be a key to open the doors to target decision-makers. They can share your content with others in their company and raise awareness within the buying team. 

Old playbook where marketing does air cover and sales does automated outreach. To generate a pipeline you need to connect and manually engage with multiple different buying committee members.

Split the roles and responsibilities.

Allocate time to do continuous meaningful engagement and relationship building.

Do regular syncs to share updates and collected insights.

Your sales team will only thank you.

2. Engagement & intent tracking.

Marketing and sales should define together the key sources of intent and engagement to identify engaged accounts (those that hit engagement threshold). These accounts should be moved to account qualification and account research stages (or transferred to ABM team, if you have ABM strategy in place). 

Both teams also should cross-share the information about all interactions with target accounts.

Here are some sources to look at and split in the responsibilities.

Marketing.

• Webinars/events sign-ups
• Visits of high-intent website pages
• Newsletter sign-ups/engagement
• LinkedIn content engagement (organic and paid)
• Consumption of content in the content hubs
• Account penetration (new people sign up for newsletter, events, connect or engage with your company)
• Brand and target account mentions

Sales.

• Organic content engagement
• Organizational changes in target accounts
• Job changes by buying committee members of existing clients
• Funding
• Changes in tech stack related to our products
• Press releases about key initiatives
• Questions target accounts ask in the industry communities
• Account penetration (connections with new buying committee members)
• Conversations happening with the accounts
• Ideas how marketing can help.

These insights help to execute timely outreach or engagement, personalize next steps and accelerate pipeline.

Here is how to use intent data for hyper-targeted marketing and sales campaigns.

3. Pipeline acceleration and demand capturing.

A lot of marketers mess demand capturing with direct ads and retargeting. Well, retargeting is a part of the demand capturing program, but not the program itself. At least, not in the complex B2B.

B2B demand capturing is identifying engaged accounts (previous step), qualifying them and adding to relevant nurturing and activation playbooks depending on their tier.

Next step is pipeline acceleration. It includes:

• Account research to collect the insights about the key initiatives, product needs, and the buying journey stage
• Buying committee structure, their goals, needs, and challenges.
• Matching value proposition and offer with the buying committee needs and goals
• Define the nurturing and activation content we can show to accelerate the demand (paid and organic)
• Executing warm-up and activation playbooks

Key joint programs.

• Multilevel account penetration and social selling
• Nurturing ads
• Retargeting with case studies and customer stories when the account is moved to the activation stage.
• Regular engagement
• 1:1 and 1:few events
• Direct mail (check this ABM campaign case study)
• Personalized content hubs
• Engagement-based or intent-based outreach 

4. Buyer and sales enablement.

To accelerate demand capturing you need to have a buyer enablement program. 

The goal of the program is not armoring sales with sales content, but providing comprehensive answers to the typical buyer’s questions, objections, and concerns. We need to help buyers to make the right decisions.

Keep in mind that quite often sales won’t be talking to the decision-makers, but to the Champions.

Champions will be selling your solution internally and will get lots of questions like:

• Budget justification and ROI
• Vertical use cases and results they can expect
• Migration, security and onboarding
• Risks coming from bringing you in as a vendor

Support sales with this content to pre-address all potential questions or concerns and accelerate sales cycle.

Buyer enablement content might include:

• FAQs
• Benefits for different buying committee roles
• Comparison reports
• ROI calculators
• Vertical case studies and references
• Product migration
• Product security

In the episode below we share more practical examples of how both teams can work together.

Now, let’s zoom out from joint full funnel operations and look at the practical activities marketing and sales should regularly execute.

How to create joint marketing and sales programs.

1. Define the type of programs, goals and objectives.

Start with an analysis of sales pipeline velocity and an honest conversation with sales about current bottlenecks and possible solutions.

He is an example.

Bottleneck. The win rate is low because target accounts are not aware of our product and don’t want to risk bringing an unknown vendor.

Solution. Use LinkedIn for thought leadership and audience growth with target accounts to raise awareness and build trust in the market.

We’ll use LinkedIn thought leadership as an example to explain the next steps.

2. Set up a pilot team.

Define a small pilot team (1 marketer and 1 SDR) that will work on a shared playbook on one market and vertical. Don’t involve everybody right off the bat for something that is not proven.

Small committed team will be able to execute faster and achieve better results.

Make sure that pilot team books dedicated slots to work on the program in their calendars.

3. Define leading indicators and target actions to execute the program.

Discuss with sales what actions can help to achieve defined goals. Include a cadence or schedule of actions that could be measured (leading indicators).

Thought leadership program core pillars:

• 3 weekly posts
• 50 personalized connection requests
• 50 engagements with target accounts

4. Responsibilities.

Make sure everybody knows what they are in charge of.

Marketing. 

• Creating content for sales
• Engaging with thought leaders
• Connecting with marketing peers from target accounts.

Sales.

• Personalized connection requests
• Engagement with the buying committee of target accounts
• Social selling.

5. Set up the right expectations and positive signals.

Not all playbooks will immediately generate revenue (especially, if your sales cycle is long).

Define positive signals that the playbook performs well, and you’ll be able to see its impact on revenue growth.

Example.

• Increased acceptance and reply rate for sales
• Conversations with target accounts
• Inbound opportunities or requests/questions about the product
• Media invites

6. Define adequate timeline for a pilot program.

Too many B2B companies make the same mistake of judging the program’s performance too fast. 2–3 weeks is not enough to make adequate conclusions.

Create a realistic timeline to give the playbook enough time to get traction.

Time, commitment, and patience are the keys to success. When you are satisfied with positive signals and program performance, share your wins with the entire team and discuss if it makes sense to involve more people.

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Marketing & Sales Alignment Meetings

To make marketing and sales work together, make sure you’ve scheduled these 4 sync meetings.

1. Weekly joint campaign and pipeline review.

Agenda.

• Leading indicators report for every joint campaign
• Wins: what moves us forward?
• Challenges: what’s holding us back?
• Improvements: how can we refine current programs and playbooks?

2. ABM sync & review meetings.

Agenda.

• Leading indicators report
• Target account engagement, updates, and insights collected
• Next actions per account
• What accounts should be removed from the program
• What accounts should be added to the program

3. Quarterly sales & marketing planning.

Agenda:

• Sales pipeline velocity review
• Revenue report
• Retrospective of all joint campaigns
• Next quarter planning: goals and metrics

4. GTM marketing and sales alignment meeting.

Yes, we’re back to the fundamental alignment. Marketing and sales should regularly review and refine their Go-To-Market Strategy. Depending on the maturity of your organization, host this meeting at least twice a year.

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Integrated full-funnel teams instead of siloed functions

To wrap up this guide, I want to share a visual set up of integrated full-funnel marketing teams. You can use it to sync your different functions after achieving fundamental alignment with GTM strategy. 

1. Product marketing.

Product marketing is in charge of understanding buyer behavior, jobs to be done, product adoption, user experience and product launches.

2. Demand generation team.

The main goal of the demand function is to drive demand, inbound inquiries and generate a pool of engaged accounts for the ABM and sales teams. 

Responsibilities.

• Run an “always-on” calendar of demand generation activities (social, communities, co-creation, guest contribution, events…). Ideally, the team has all the necessary skills to avoid bottlenecks (content, event management, subject-matter expertise)
• Remove friction & capture demand (in collaboration with marketing ops and ABM teams)
• Nurture flows, progressive profiling (in collaboration with marketing ops and ABM teams)
• Enabling sales w/ social content, event warm-up and follow-up and co-creation

3. ABM team.

The main goal of the ABM function is to drive net-new, renewal and expansion revenue with strategic accounts. 

Responsibilities.

• Work with PM on vertical ICP and messaging
• Work with demand and marketing ops to source intent & engagement data
• Account research and value proposition mapping
• Work with sales on account expansion & renewal
• Account warm-up plays
• Account activation plays

4. Marketing Operations.

Marketing operations provide the backbone infrastructure and tech stack, and make sure that:

• The key data, metrics and report are available to anyone in the team
• The digital buyer journey is as frictionless as possible
• ABM and sales teams get timely qualified intent and engagement data, and alerts about target accounts

Takeaways and next steps

Going from siloed functions to a revenue team is only possible when both marketing and sales are both aligned on a go-to-market approach and programs to create awareness, demand generation, and activation.

Next step – regular joint operations and sync meetings across the full funnel to generate revenue.

To get assistance in achieving Go-to-market and executional alignment between marketing and sales, schedule a call here or message me on LinkedIn for more details. 

If you want to uplift your skills and learn more about the process, get step-by-step guidelines in our GTM strategy playbook.

 It’s actionable training to align your marketing, sales, and executives on the focus target market, positioning, channels, campaigns, and content to land ideal customers, grow your deal size, and accelerate your pipeline.

Learn more about B2B Marketing Strategy Playbook here.