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The 5 indicators of healthy sales-marketing alignment

How can a business ensure sales and marketing teams communicate and are on the same page? Ask these five questions and make sure both teams share a common language.

My cousin tells a story of how on a busy Saturday stuck in traffic, with three screaming kids in the minivan, he noticed a car trying to enter from a side street. He honked and cursed furiously at the entitled woman in her fancy car inching her way in. Once he got close enough, window to window, he realized it was a doctor who had treated him years earlier.

After this realization, the situation changed. She wasn't a faceless, entitled driver with the goal of cutting him off. She was someone he cherished headed in the same direction during a busy Saturday.

So often, the frustration between teams in organizations, especially marketing and sales, comes from being faceless colleagues without a common language or understanding. With the classic push and pull -- where marketers believe sales reps don't work the leads they send, and sales reps believe marketers don't send the right leads -- it's easier to imagine the other team is aiming to cut you off rather than each trying to find the best way to move forward.

Figuring out how to create that common language can involve big-picture decisions, like aligning goals among teams and having shared incentives. But these are time- and effort-intensive initiatives. In my work as in-house and fractional chief marketing officer, I've found the following five questions -- and subsequent best practices -- can help create sales and marketing alignment in a B2B environment, and do so quickly. The results are cleaner funnels, increased lead velocity and overall revenue growth.

1. Do you have a shared language?

I recently worked with an organization where the sales and marketing teams were at a standstill over the poor state of leads. When the two sides were forced to sit down, we uncovered that the business development representative team and the marketing team defined leads differently.

The frustration between teams in organizations, especially marketing and sales, comes from being faceless colleagues without a common language or understanding.

I asked both teams: "What does a marketing-qualified lead mean?"

The sales team's answer: "A 'hot lead' is someone who wants to talk to us, and we should work quickly to contact them."

The marketing team's answer: "We started out with MQL [a marketing-qualified lead] being someone who reaches a certain score threshold or fills out the Contact Us form and is well vetted, but there was a new directive from leadership to increase lead flow. So, we made MQL anyone who fills out any type of form on our site."

So, the sales team thinks they're getting people who are eager to talk to them. The marketing team knows the contact is someone who just signed up for a blog and has little to no interest in receiving outreach. Complete misalignment. How does that happen?

This company, like so many, has sales and marketing systems set up over time, and often under different leadership and strategies than what exists in the present. As a result, the language used at the onset can get lost.

Solution: We sat in the room until we got to a rubric that both sales and marketing agreed upon.

Below are former and newly agreed-upon definitions throughout the top of the funnel that the teams now use regularly to discuss the process.

2. Do you have service-level agreements?

How long does a sales team have to acknowledge, act on and accept or reject a lead from a marketing team? This is possibly the most important element in the sales and marketing alignment process and it also creates the most headaches. For the handoff to be successful, both teams must agree upon service-level agreements (SLAs) and systems for monitoring.

The SLA should include how much time each team has to move the lead forward. For example, the chart in Figure 1 details that from the time a prospect fills out a Contact Us form as a handraiser, the marketing department has four hours to send that to a sales person -- though it often happens instantly. Then, the sales rep has four hours to acknowledge they are aware of the lead through the CRM system, and four more hours to decide if they want to work it.

Example of a finalized compliance rubric that the client's marketing and sales teams agreed to.

CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot can send alerts when SLAs are missed. Those alerts are sent over email to the salesperson. The marketing team also updates a shared dashboard with daily, weekly and/or monthly temperature checks on the health of the sales funnel.

Both teams must review the SLA and system results in ongoing meetings. Over time, they show patterns. Do specific salespeople not get the leads properly? Are the marketing team's scores off, so they send the wrong leads? Discussing these in weekly or bimonthly meetings can prevent lead backup and increase clarity and communication.

3. Do you have agreed-upon prospect titles?

It doesn't matter if lead flow is paid or organic. Understanding what defines a successful lead is key.

Creating personas based on company size, geography and department are all part of the process. One of the most important is the title. When asked, many salespeople will say, "I'll take any title." However, most B2B salespeople need specific leads in specific roles. Whether you need to build a case with junior-level practitioners or get the buy-in of C-suite, you should do enough audience testing and encourage feedback between marketing and sales teams to determine the titles of who to target.

4. Is there consistent reporting from marketing to sales teams?

Looking back to pre-pandemic data, we see more than half of marketers did not feel empowered to collaborate with sales teams, according to Salesforce. In the subsequent years, marketers found it harder to collaborate with colleagues. The data over time is getting worse, so how do you create successful collaboration between marketing and sales teams with specific checks and balances?

Creating a dashboard puts the groups' collective needs in one place and can help create alignment. It enables asynchronous understanding and collaboration among key stakeholders, decreases confusion and increases healthy discussions. It becomes a source of truth for the groups.

Example dashboard a business could create then present to the revenue operations team.

Still, the biggest success I've seen as a marketer was established, ongoing lead meetings approximately two times per month where we reviewed macro and micro lead flow. Macro includes overall volume, trends and opportunities for improvement. Micro involves pulling two to four leads from the previous two weeks and telling their journeys. I've often grabbed headshots and LinkedIn profiles, in addition to walking the sales team through the digital experience of leads, including how they entered and whether they converted to handraisers or learners.

It's important to humanize the people coming through the funnel and to show both wins and losses.

5. Do sales teams provide consistent feedback to marketing teams?

Things change. Marketing and sales teams are dynamic, and their systems must be reviewed and revisited constantly. The titles you agreed to in January might not convert in June. Those changes are fine, but only if both teams understand the changes through system feedback and ongoing dialogue. Organic and paid channels only improve with feedback more descriptive than saying, "bad lead."

So, organizations can implement a sales and marketing summit twice a year to ensure all key stakeholders are still aligned to the philosophy, terminology and expectations. A one or two hour-long meeting can help avoid days of confusion, frustration and a lost pipeline.

We are all on a bumpy highway of this unstable economy and confusing business climate. Creating a common language and understanding between sales and marketing teams can help to smooth the road and provide a better overall climate to achieve a successful alignment and a healthy pipeline.

About the author

Aimee Schuster is CEO and founder at Bandwidth Strategy, a fractional C-suite consulting group that empowers B2B organizations in growth mode. She has over 20 years experience leading early and mid-staged organizations in operations, marketing and sales. Aimee is the co-founder of Women Influence Chicago, a leadership accelerator for women technologists, a board member and angel investor.

by Dylan

What Gen Z women risk losing because of remote and hybrid work

It was a moment that was years in the making. There I was, watching the young offspring of my “squad”—a group of women who met through work almost two decades ago—saying the Pledge of Allegiance at one of these women’s induction as a federal judge.  

I met my squad 16 years earlier at a law firm in downtown Chicago. Over time, the group grew and stayed connected, in part, because we automatically saw each other multiple times per week at work. We stopped by each other’s offices to problem-solve, met for pre-work runs, grabbed coffee or lunch to talk about our days. Today, this group of nine powerful, successful women serve as each other’s biggest work champions, trusted financial advisors, knowledgeable healthcare advocates, and family boosters. We’ve supported each other in negotiating C-suite jobs, writing books, landing board seats, starting our own businesses, and even, on this particular day, becoming a federal judge.

We were each other’s strength during so much of the pandemic—the pandemic that changed the way we work, and upended the format of life that created our bond. As I sat in the courtroom that day, I started to question, would I have ever met these incredible women in the current pandemic-created work environment? In this two-dimensional Zoom world can we, or future generations, still form these tight-knit communities? Without question, much of my success at work (and in life) is because for 20 of the last 23 years, I went to an office every Monday through Friday without thinking there was any other way.

THE LOSS OF ‘SOCIAL CAPITAL’ 

In a recent study, Microsoft analyzed a plethora of gains and losses as a result of the past few years in the pandemic work-from-home reality. One of the first elements they talk about is “a loss of social capital” in context of how decreased coworker connections and interactions impact the organization. This, of course, makes sense, but to take this a step further we should examine how the loss of “social capital” for the individual’s lifelong pursuits (after they have left that one organization) is far greater. The face-to-face networking, lunches, coffees, events, and water cooler conversations that I participated in for the bulk of my career all created the social capital that helped me in my job at the time; but clearly helped me even more in the totality of my career. 

And, while technology has always been part of my networking strategy (email follow-ups and social media interactions, more recently Slack channels, etc.), I know that the true strength of my relationships came from actually meeting people face-to-face, reading their body language, and getting to know them in a three-dimensional world. It’s not that I didn’t have digital-first relationships as a chief marketing officer of a global organization. I managed people all over the world; but the relationships that stuck from that time are the ones where we met in person, shared a glass of wine during a real-life discussion. For all of us trying to manage this hybrid-work life, we must recognize that the art of spontaneous get-togethers now seems nearly impossible.

Related: The pink tax isn’t just financial

Pre-pandemic, there was no shortage of challenges for women in business: pay inequity, a lack of C-suite roles, and minimal BOD representation. Any progress we’ve made in these areas is largely because of the squads who help us make connections, and push us forward. But the studies are pointing to even more inequities caused by the pandemic: 52% of women in leadership are responsible for most or all of their family’s housework and/or childcare vs. 13% of men in leadership. So, as men advance, they do less household labor, they have more time to network, grow business, and expand their spheres of influence; women don’t have that luxury even as we continue to rise to the top. Women seem to forever be forced to dance, backward and in heels. 

‘FORCED TO DANCE BACKWARD’

As the reality of the post-pandemic workplace continues to unfold, I wondered how younger women will create these networks that will help them as they are forced to dance backward? The Women In the Workplace 2022 report found that a majority of women prefer remote and hybrid work. Here’s one very telling quote: “My company had us return to the office two days a week. But in my role, I mainly just need to work quietly alone. When I go back to the office, I don’t feel as efficient. There are so many interruptions. I know the social aspect is important, but getting work done is also important.” She knows the social elements are important, but still would rather work from home. And you know what, as a young person, I would have preferred to work from home, too. Getting dressed up, facing micro and macro aggressions, commuting, introvertedness; I didn’t want to be in an office either.  

But I didn’t have a choice, and for that I am truly grateful. Those years in a physical office served as an automatic 401k deposit of social capital in my career bank. The pandemic gave all of us the permission to not be present; to shun long-term investments of social capital; to ignore the career bank. The pandemic took so much, and now it may be robbing women of their future networks too—the ones that will lift them up and pull them through the complexities of work and life. 

Maybe younger Gen Zs will find success building squads through purely digital connections. Or, maybe the balance will shift back: According to a 2021 SHRM article, 64% of 500 U.S. college seniors polled want to work onsite most of the time or full time. I hope this is true and we as a society find a way to create a hybrid work environment that allows women to build (and re-build) our social capital 401k. We need to find a balance that combines the benefits of working remotely but creates space (literally and figuratively) for in-person networking opportunities that serve all of us so well. An office of the future where mentors, mentees, and peers share some coffee and critical conversation.

After our children said the pledge at the swearing in, my friend, the newly appointed Federal Judge, spoke of our group in the courtroom. She said that these eight women were part of the reason for her appointment to the bench; that us showing up to support this past decade is part of what helped her find success. In that humbling moment, I considered the circumstances and fate that brought us together. I fretted about the future of the younger women just starting their careers and while decades away, my own child’s work life. I do hope my daughter goes to an office for her job so she can try, learn, fail, and grow. I want her to have all the opportunities that in-person work created for me, including a community of women committed to helping one another succeed. Ultimately, I hope she finds her own squad.

Aimee Schuster is an entrepreneur and principal at Bandwidth Strategy, a fractional C-suite consulting group that empowers B2B organizations in growth mode.

by Dylan

The Non-Traditional Route To Set Up a Six Figure Consulting Company

As the Great Resignation storms on (nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in January 2022 alone), which is creating more opportunity for entrepreneurs than ever. In 2021, more people searched Google for “how to start a business” than they did “how to get a job.” For those who have been considering a leave from corporate America to try consulting, the timing has never been better.

Setting up a legal entity, considering office space, designing business cards seem like the appropriate early steps to start a business. While all those items are important, they all cost money; and new businesses need to be focused on making money. I did the opposite of what most people would recommend when I started my business.  I was still able to grow a highly successful six figure consulting company in only one year. It was all thanks to using these low-cost tools and spending just a few thousand dollars all in.

Get Started (0-3 months) Total Cost <$200.00 

They say “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” and if you’ve cultivated a strong network, they’ll come through for you when going off on your own. When you’re ready to take the plunge, focus mostly on the client work and these four elements to help you kick things off:

• Statement of Work: you need a contract between you and the client that you can sign and agree to the terms of the engagement (price, deliverables, and timing). Here are some examples [$0]>> https://www.smartsheet.com/free-statement-work-templates
• Invoicing:  Your invoice doesn’t need to be fancy – for the first year I used an invoice template like this one and it worked great. [$0] https://create.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/invoices
• Track expenses: For the first few months, keep expenses on a spreadsheet and save your receipts. You don’t need an accounting system quite yet. [$0]
• Tracking your hours: This function is worth investing in immediately. As a new consultant, you have no idea if the work is profitable if there’s no insight into how many hours you’re spending on a project or client. I tried to do this via spreadsheet at first  and quickly stumbled. A fellow consultant turned me onto Toggl ($9 per month). I’ve spoken to others who use clockify.me which is free. [$0-$120]

Time to Refine (3-9 months) Total Cost $340.00

Ninety days in, you’ll begin to get a sense if the consulting company feels viable. While the money might not be rolling in yet, there’s enough to start implementing some more infrastructure:

• Company Name: It’s tricky to triangulate what you want to be called, which website names are available, and what you can register in in your state. Try writing out about 25 names, then check a site like GoDaddy to see what’s available. Once locked in on one or two, go to your Secretary of State office website and check to see if there’s a similar name out there. You can register a similar name as someone else’s if you’re working in different industries. Once you have the name, the URL is an easy purchase via domain registrar. [$30 for 2 years]
• Website & Email: Decide on an email service (like Google Suite) and hosting and CMS (such as Squarespace). They have basic templates you can design yourself to keep things simple. [$250 for Google Suite + Squarespace for 1 year]
• Logo & Materials: Fiverr is a great resource for designing things like a logo and a branded PowerPoint. [$60.00]

Professionalize and Plan (9-12 Months) Total Cost ~$2,750.00

This is the time to decide: go or no-go on your consulting company. If it’s not for you, you’ve invested under $500 and now you pivot to looking for a full time role. If you do love it, you will need to put in place more substantial elements to take you beyond:

• Incorporation: After three quarters, it’s time to incorporate. Small law firms or online services can do this work at a reasonable price. [$350 for an attorney + $200 state and federal fees]
• Master Service Agreement and SOW: Your attorney can review your Statement of Work and provide you with a Master Service Agreement (MSA) that protects you and your newly created company. [~$2,000 attorney fees]
• Bank account and credit card: This will make life easier when tax time comes. Choose a credit card with no annual fees, that will give cash back that can be put towards the business. [$0 in annual fees]
• Accounting software: While basic invoices are fine at first, they don’t tie into a larger system and don’t help keep track of cash flow and spend. Products like QuickBooks Self-Employed is terrific for year-end tax work, organizing your receipts, etc. [$196 per year]

Mistakes will be made along the way, and I certainly made a few. I paid for a calendaring system I thought I would need but didn’t. Then, I also used a free Zoom account for way too long (and kept having to end meetings early). I went slow and reached profitability early, which gave me the confidence and capital to keep going to succeed. 

by Dylan

Don’t make these marketing budget mistakes in 2022

The inherent difficulty in setting a marketing budget is knowing that it’s almost never set. As I’ve experienced throughout my career, marketing dollars are the first to be pulled back as revenue comes up short. Or, the CEO decides a pet project should be funded and pulls resources from a different department to run with the idea. Despite the situation often being fluid throughout the year, you have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is now: budget season!

Amidst global, local and industry swirl — elections, supply chain disasters, stock market crash predictions and pandemic realities — CMOs must predict what channels will succeed in an highly unstable, unique business environment. With so many channels evolving, how do you bet on marketing budgets when the game keeps changing?

Based on my years of planning and advising on global budgets, and with this coming year’s market nuances in mind, here are some traps to avoid when budget planning for 2022.

Stop trying to hire

The Great Resignation has changed everything about the working environment and especially marketing. The mass exodus from jobs finally broke location barriers and made work-anywhere a reality. It also created a salary frenzy unlike anything I’ve seen in 20 years. As a manager of the budget, I’d advise pausing all hiring for the first six months of 2022. Paying astronomical rates for marketing talent coupled with long ramp-up times can be difficult in a good economy, let alone an unstable one. Instead, tap into freelance, fractional and agency resources to help fill gaps.

These skilled professionals know how to jump in quickly and get the work done without you having to evaluate them for culture fit and long-term potential.

Pull back from online advertising

The digital ad marketplace is rapidly evolving. We’ve known for some time that Google plans to phase out third-party cookies for Chrome, and while it has pushed it to 2023, that reality is coming. Plus, the effectiveness of digital ads is wildly oversold, according to an article in Harvard Business Review that cites a large-scale analysis of Facebook ads and reports that brand search ad effectiveness was overestimated by 4,000%. As these ads become less and less impactful, it can take more skilled experts to navigate the medium.

I recently vetted a growth organization specializing in online ads that charges $6,000 in administrative fees with a $25,000 minimum spend on the ad platforms. To me, those numbers seem fair, given their skills and the dollars needed to make the campaigns successful. But that type of advertising money is way out of reach of many smaller and mid-sized companies.

Advertising can and should be a part of the marketing mix and a portion of the budget, but for 2022, I would scale that down considerably to drive first-party data acquisition for a more diversified digital portfolio.

Don’t ignore the new SEO

A good SEO strategy is the bedrock of every content plan. Trying to help searchers find answers in the moments they have questions is the best way to get the right traffic to your site and the right leads to your sales organization.

There is no secret recipe for SEO; good backend structure and solid content makes for a successful lead-driven website. That said, there is a new element to consider: it’s not just fingers doing the searches anymore. Voice search is growing faster for the e-commerce market than the B2B space, but it should not be ignored. These keywords will be more conversational and less robotic than the first generation of SEO.

Consider using some of your advertising dollars to engage with an SEO expert and work to tweak and optimize your existing site with things like a solid FAQ page, long-tail keywords and refocus on mobile optimization, where a large part of voice search occurs.

Don’t invest only in long-form video

In a B2B world, the webinar often reigns supreme. The company may gather experts in their own hosted forum or participate in another organization’s event. Regardless, the 45 to 60 minutes is often considered one of the gold standards for establishing and creating thought leadership.

Where many companies fall down is slapping the uncut video up on their YouTube page and driving a bunch of traffic there. Long-form video is great, but to get the most out of that investment, marketers need to recruit and spend dollars on video editors to create additional short form assets: 20-, 30- and 45-second teasers that can be used on social media; splices of individuals speaking for them to share with their own networks; putting together a two-minute teaser reel that highlights the whole piece; adding subtitles so viewers can understand without sound.

All of these elements require the skills of an editor who is comfortable creating professional introductions and fadeouts, adding music or improving sound quality. Using all of these assets effectively will create great first-party data and engaged leads.

Avoid assuming events will return or be the same

This one is a wildcard, as most of us have assumed the pandemic was “almost over” only to have our plans dashed. For events not hosted by your company, I would advise putting those dollars toward Q3 and Q4 and assume you may have to pivot to web. If your organization is very bullish on hosting events in the first part of the year, make sure it’s a true hybrid model.

This means more than just placing a laptop in a conference room and meeting via Zoom. Engage with a production crew, invest in lighting, multiple cameras and high-end sets to make the experience excellent for those in the room and online. You may have to spend more for the hybrid, but you know that you can host it no matter the circumstances.

Recent years have been tumultuous, and next year’s landscape is sure to be unique in its own right. If we’ve learned anything, it’s to assume that things will not stay the same. But fluidity is where marketing shines: avoid the pitfalls, set the budget, review, adapt and keep going!

by Dylan