How to Align Sales with Cross-Functional Teams

Over the years, I've discovered the truth: Game-changing products won't succeed unless they have a unified vision across sales, marketing, and product teams. When these key functions pull in different directions, it's a death knell for go-to-market execution. Without alignment on positioning and buyer messaging, we fail to communicate value and create disjointed experiences. So, how do I foster collaboration across these functions? 1) Set shared goals and incentivize unity towards that North Star metric, be it revenue, activations, or retention. 2) Encourage team members to work closely together, building empathy rather than skepticism of other groups' intentions and contributions. 3) Regularly conduct cross-functional roadmapping sessions to cascade priorities across departments and highlight dependencies. 4) Create an environment where teams can constructively debate assumptions and strategies without politics or blame. 5) Provide clarity for sales on target personas and value propositions to equip them for deal conversations. 6) Involve all functions early in establishing positioning and messaging frameworks. Co-create when possible. By rallying together around customers’ needs, we block and tackle as one team towards product-market fit. The magic truly happens when teams unite towards a shared mission to delight users!

I struggled with the leap from Mid-Market to Enterprise sales. It was like one day being a top college athlete- and the next, getting my a$$ handed to me at the pro level. Until 2 great mentors gave me 3 key pieces of advice. Here's what they said: ---> Build an Internal Network ---> Planning Will Save You ---> Stay in Sync ---> Build an Internal Network Find out who you'll work with in Legal, Finance, and Deal Desk. Put a short intro call on their calendar. Find out their story. Their likes and dislikes. Ask how best to work with them. Then mark your calendar to reach out to them every few weeks - and ask for nothing. Establishing relationships before you need something from these teams can be crucial later. And just a good decent thing to do. ---> Planning Will Save You Start creating account plans for your top high-value accounts. Both to show high-level strategy and drive accountability around execution. You will use them with all your co-selling teammates, including executive alignment with internal leadership. These shared documents are invaluable. You can view an example of a template I've used in the comments. ---> Stay in Sync Have regular sync/prep meetings on the calendar with your teammates in Pre-sales, Support, and Customer success. And do not cancel or schedule over these calls. They are sacred. Regular time together cuts down on miscommunication, saves 100s of Slack messages, and creates alignment. You'll have fewer fire drills re: deal strategy, saving a renewal, etc. Moving from Mid-Market to Enterprise selling means going from being a top soloist to conducting the whole orchestra. What worked before won't be enough. What was your biggest surprise when you started handling larger accounts? Want more actionable sales insights every week? More info for ya below ⬇️ #pipelineanxiety #sales

Some of my hardest lessons as a sales leader came when figuring out how to setup and run training (learn from my mistakes!) Me as a new leader: "Great we have 10 topics we want to cover... let's do 1 a week. 2.5 months later we will have covered SO much ground!" 🙃 Training was more of a "box checking" exercise. Someone shared feedback on what they wanted to learn, and it got added to the list Having one 30 or 60 minute training on any topic is never sufficient, and I did the team a disservice So what was missing? And what did I seek to add later? 👉 Focus Instead of 10 topics, we might go into a quarter with 1-2 priority focus areas. The deeper engagement on a narrower topic is not unlike narrowing your focus on a smaller set of ICP accounts This creates room for practice, follow up sessions, different voices delivering the material, and ultimately makes the content stickier 👉 Engagement from other departments Where applicable, involvement from other departments can add incredible value to your training program. For instance, when you are training on a new product category, it is valuable to: - Hear firsthand from Product how it's built - Align your training timeline with Product Marketing so that materials are ready to go as the training commences - Work with Marketing so that messaging aligns to how you can sell it and everyone has the same talking points from day 1 - Work with Rev Ops to identify a market opportunity to apply your learnings - Have Sales Enablement help prepare uses cases in your sales tech stack 👉 A system to encourage accountability Once the trainings are delivered, how do you know that the sales team was paying attention? That can take many forms: - Group activity like pitch practice - Measuring adoption through tools like Gong - Contest/SPIF to encourage initial matching sales activity - Knowledge tests in your LMS (my least favorite) 👉 Repetition There's a reason Sesame Street used to repeat episodes during the week - once wasn't enough to get the message home! While your sales team isn't full of 3 year olds, similar principles apply Bottom line: instead of thinking about any topic as a single "training", think about creating "training programs" for your team 🎓 Tying it all together for a training on "New Product A" Week 1: Product & Product Marketing introduce the new offering Week 2: Outside expert/marketing/leadership deliver the industry POV Week 3: Team gets together to identify prospects and practice the pitch Week 4: Team provides feedback on material and prospecting plans are built incorporating the training Weeks 5-8: Measuring adoption through Gong. Shouting out strong adoption and privately helping laggards identify gaps in understanding Week 6: Short contest to encourage cross/up-sell opportunity creation Week 12: Revisit/Feedback #SalesEnablement #SalesTraining #LeadershipLessons #CorrCompetencies

How to create strong alignment between sales and marketing? I had a wonderful lunch yesterday with Maria Toft from Cockroach Labs, and I really liked one of the points she made: "A strong alignment is built upon a clear language that is SHARED & BUILT by both sales and marketing." Maria shared this story: Cockroach uses MadKudu to determine which accounts will likely buy from Sales - based on various first-party data and third-party intent. The sales team used to see this as a "likelihood to buy" field in Salesforce. Maria noticed this term was confusing to sellers. She could have picked a term she likes better or something she believes is the "right" term. But instead, she talked to the sales leadership to hear what THEY found most clear and helpful. The feedback was very interesting: "Likelihood to buy" is confusing. Some folks offered "MQA". But this triggered an unhelpful conversation about whether "marketing" is really the only one making an account qualified. They ended up with "ERA": "Engagement Reached Account" She had a similar conversation about account fit. Sales found "ICP fit" to be clearer. With everyone aligned on this semantic, she had the salesforce fields relabeled: "ICP fit" and "Engagement Reached Account". The point I got from this story is not that everyone should use those terms. It is: 1. the language you use with your sales team matters very much. 2. It should be consistent everywhere and across teams (eg. in slides but also in Salesforce and all the tools). 3. Involving the sales team early and frequently is the only way to build a shared language. Has anyone been through a similar experience? How do you describe the fit and engagement of your leads and accounts? PS: personal confession - we used "natural MQL" or "nMQL" for a while at MadKudu to describe "non-handraiser inbound leads". You guessed it: we did not ask for Sales's input. And yes... every new person in the GTM team had to be trained on what a nMQL meant. 😈 Lesson learned.

How I help SaaS teams find alignment For a BOFU content strategy Without driving myself crazy Marketing and Sales alignment is achieved when: - Sales - Customer Success - Product - Marketing Agree on: - What the product is - Who the product helps - How the product helps I help content teams achieve this faster by: - Getting information from every team - Creating a collaborative working environment - Addressing any misalignments early Here are some questions you can ask each team Sales: - How do they use [PRODUCT] during their day-to-day activities? - What are the most used features of the product? - Of all product or service features, are there one or two that people seem to be attracted to when buying? Customer Success: - What customers need low support? - Who are your largest accounts? - Who do you view as your “best” customers? - What companies have you been able to sell additional services to? Product: - How is our product positioned in the market? - What are our customer’s needs? - How can we create features that addresses those needs? - What does our roadmap look like? Marketing: - What are our customers searching for when looking for a solution like ours? - How are we tracking inbound leads and revenue from content? - Are we positioning our product based on the ICP that’s making the search? Alignment is critical because it expands across all of your collateral, sales channels and messaging. It’s why I start here when working with teams. Achieving alignment will not always be this straightforward especially at bigger companies where you have: - More opinions - More red-tape - Scattered priorities But this is a good first step.

In many companies I know, the relationship between Sales and Marketing can often feel strained, almost like a "Sales vs Marketing" scenario. 🛑 It's about Sales AND Marketing working together as ONE cohesive team. 💯 Something I've loved at Spendflo is the alignment between the Sales and Marketing Team. 🔥 Here are some key insights for Marketing leaders: - Revenue Marketing - Most sales leaders get frustrated when your goals and KPIs are not aligned with theirs. If yours is MQL or leads and it doesn't yield in the pipeline, sales feel you do not contribute in the right way. Important to take pipeline targets. Stay closer to the revenue. - Expectation Setting - Communicate with Sales leaders about the potential and timelines for marketing efforts to yield results. This helps them plan their activities more effectively and fosters better collaboration between teams. - Regular Communication - Encourage open dialogue and cross-departmental collaboration to share insights, challenges, and successes. Platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or regular meetings can facilitate this. Sharing insights, challenges, and successes strengthens alignment and enhances teamwork. - Joint Strategy Development: Involve your leaders in the development of strategies and campaigns. Their expertise ensures alignment with market needs and customer expectations. Hear them out but it's your call. - Invest in your stack: Investing in a good stack brings visibility and clarity to different steps in the marketing and sales process. Eliminate black boxes. - Feedback Loops: Establish feedback mechanisms to gather insights from Sales on lead quality and customer feedback. We can use this input to optimize campaigns and messaging for better results. - Celebrate wins together: Recognize and celebrate joint successes to reinforce the importance of collaboration and teamwork. This boosts morale and strengthens the bond between Sales and Marketing teams. I'm super happy to have Edward Kim and Siddhant Mittal as my partners in crime in growing Spendflo. Their dedication and collaboration epitomize the spirit of teamwork that drives our success. 🙏 🙏 And obviously, this cannot be possible without a strong marketing team by your side. Super proud of the team. 💯 2024 - Here we come. 🔥 Siddharth Sridharan Rajiv Ramanan Ajay Vardhan #salesandmarketing #salesandmarketingalignment

Everyone and their mom has had an opinion about “the sales and marketing disconnect.” In my experience leading a Sales Ops team pre-Adobe acquisition at Workfront, and leading the Marketing Ops team at Kustomer pre-Meta acquisition, I saw what I have now confirmed with dozens of consulting clients: VERY FEW people deeply care about “alignment” in the squishy “let’s be friends just cuz” ways you might want them to. If you’re in Marketing, it’s easy to see how Sales is not doing the right things with your leads. It’s easy to see that the data isn’t clean because of sales. Easy to feel sales ops is incompetent. Easy to not feel heard. If you’re in Sales, it’s pretty basic, you just want more — more leads, more content, more use cases. And you want better — high quality leads, high quality content. And somewhere in the middle is the under utilized, overworked operations person or team — trying to make sense of political BS, bad data, valid perspectives on both sides, and an inability to truly create change on critical things both parties want. Here’s a lesson for the future of Rev Ops: As an ops person, you’re NEVER going to be given “space” to just work strategically. You work with people who DO NOT CARE about “alignment” — they care about outcomes. Your work as an ops person is ALWAYS going to seem easier to others around you than it really is. So, what do we do? Your job as an ops person is to set your own boundaries and expectations. But you don’t do that by saying, “I won’t do XYZ because ME ME ME.” You do it by saying, “You are focused on XYZ right now. That means we need to figure out ABC. How do you think we should do that?” And you make your leaders think. You don’t argue. Not at first. Not yet. You need to create a culture of leaders realizing that ops work involves balancing priorities. You don’t need try to get out of doing things you know aren’t important. You make your leaders THINK. And they come to conclusions that help you define your work. This happens by asking questions about what matters and helping them see that some things really cannot matter. Some things will never matter. Some things maybe just can’t matter til later. By helping leaders define what they want and how they can get it, you create their ability to have their own ideas about how you can’t work on useless things. They will tell you, “You need to prioritize.” By helping leaders across Marketing and Sales do this together simultaneously, you can help define an operational plan that supports a shared vision. You can begin defining the roadblocks to that vision, create a path for achieving outcomes between groups that have historically no success in communication. — Conclusion: No one cares about ALIGNMENT. True alignment is not achieved by cheap talk about it. It’s achieved by outcome based, operational planning coupled with critical thinking and tactical project management tied to a change vision that leaders are aligned to.