Aligned Marketing and Sales? Master the Biggest Challenges

Aligned marketing and sales teams are more critical than ever, driving key trends like demand generation, revenue operations, account-based marketing, and asynchronous selling. Many organizations recognize the potential benefits of tightly aligned marketing and sales efforts.

But achieving true synchronization between these two critical functions often proves challenging.

Therefore, this article explores the top five obstacles to effective alignment between marketing and sales, providing actionable solutions to transform the vision of unified teams into a practical reality.

Marketing-to-Sales Handoffs

The marketing-to-sales handoff seems simple enough: when a lead becomes qualified for sales (a sales-qualified lead or an SQL), the marketing team's job is to ensure their sales colleagues know about it. 

What could go wrong?   The answer is…a lot.

To generalize, there are two areas where this handoff can go awry.  

The first is the qualifying criteria or the agreement around when the right time is to hand the lead off to sales. Think about it: what are your marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and SQL criteria? What are you using to ensure these criteria are met for day-to-day handoffs? How nuanced are the qualifications?

If your sales and marketing team may have different answers to these questions, the result can be handoff nightmares.

The second problem area involves the mechanism for your handoffs. Are your marketing leads rotated automatically once qualified, or do they already have an owner before they get to that stage? Do you assign your sales rep a task, push notifications, email them, notify them in Slack, or combine these options? 

Tools like the HubSpot Marketing Hub or HubSpot Sales Hub are great platforms to help facilitate this process, but the process only works as it has been defined. The marketing-to-sales handoff must be thought through and agreed upon by both teams to be successful – a task made much more difficult if your teams are not operating in the same systems. 

Solutions to Difficult Marketing to Sales Handoffs:

To address a less-than-perfect handoff from marketing to sales, have a meeting between your marketing operations and sales operations teams to agree on the complete parameters of your lifecycle stages.

Ask your teams what role deal stage, lead score, buying committee makeup, and ICP tier play in the timing and manner of the handoff.

Handoffs can change from team to team, ICP tier to ICP tier, and product to product.

Next, pull some reports to see at what lifecycle stage sales became involved in winning opportunities to objectively determine what has been most successful to date.

Finally, once everyone agrees on the terms of your lifecycle stages and when and how sales should be tapped to jump in, update your CRM, marketing automation platform, and other technology to accommodate these newly agreed-upon handoff guidelines.

Disparate Systems

Your sales and marketing teams could use hundreds of tools to run their motions.

What's the result? A list of tech tools the size of a Cheesecake Factory menu for your marketing operations team to deal with.

Data accuracy is everything for marketing and sales activities – especially those that require a handoff. And the more tools you have, the lower the chances are that your data is reliable. 

Too many systems can lead to:

• Too much context switching and the necessary info not being added to the correct tool 
• System syncing issues and resulting data gaps
• No single source of truth for decision-making about the success or failure of your efforts 
• Misaligned handoff and scoring criteria 

Solutions for Disparate Systems:

Disparate, isolated systems can be one of the harder problems to solve because organizations may have multiple internal stakeholders and decision-makers involved.

Nevertheless, there are a few ways to address this issue. 

First, you can move all your marketing and sales operations into a single tool like HubSpot. Marketing Hub features and Sales Hub functionality can accommodate all marketing and sales alignment needs and provide a seamless experience for your customers. 

If combining systems is not an option, consider doing an audit of where information is not being collected, synced, and updated between systems. This can impact lead scoring and lifecycle stage updates, crucial to keeping sales and marketing aligned. Reporting can also be impacted and lead to decisions made on incomplete information. 

Additionally, you will want to assess your current systems' capabilities to ensure they can achieve your goals. Can your systems trigger actions in one another to ensure that sales and marketing stay on the same page? If not, check outside your tools' native functionality using platforms like Zapier or Workato.

Inconsistent Data

Your data suffers when you have too many tools, inefficient processes for using your tech, a lack of operational leadership, or any combination of these things. When you can't trust your data, you are flying blind when making decisions that impact your customers.

Insufficient data doesn't just lead to bad calls because you can't correctly forecast your sales team's pipeline.  

Bad data means we don't personalize campaigns, get the handoff wrong, put people into the wrong segmented cohorts, and over-touch or under-touch our prospect accounts.  

Data drives your revenue engine. Everyone in your revenue operations – marketing leaders and implementers, sales managers and reps, and customer success teams – needs data to drive decisions around how they interact with customers.

Solutions for Inconsistent Data 

Often, solving the issue of disparate systems will also solve your data problems. But in instances where that’s not the case, other solutions are in order.

If you are not getting the data you need for sales and marketing to align and make insightful, helpful decisions, your data collection processes might be in the way.

The first thing you will want to do when you're thinking about your process is to interview your team to see what obstacles are preventing them from adding data. Do you have the most commonly populated properties in the left-side views of the correct records, broken down into sections? If not, then note this down as something you can improve. 

Next, consider using automation to tighten your processes and keep your data clean. For example, can you use automation to create records or move them from stage to stage of a pipeline to ensure that the data surrounding those activities remains accurate? Can you duplicate or update properties using workflows to reduce manual entry?  

Finally, ensure that all your systems share data regularly and automatically. This will ensure that everyone and every automation has the correct data at the right time. And, of course, condensing your tech stack will help keep data consistent.

Misaligned Goals - the Battle Over MQLs

Once the lead becomes an SQL, the account executive closes the deal, won or lost.  

This play seems fair enough on its face. It has been used thousands of times by thousands of marketers. But if we're talking about alignment, this play relies on a process laden with potential land mines. 

Think about it: if the marketing team has a goal to drive MQLs and is assessed based on their ability to meet that goal, their sole focus will be on getting as many gated content downloads as possible. 

What's the issue with that? Well, it turns out that the audience most likely to read your content is not necessarily the one wanting to buy your product now.  

If sales are judged by the number of MQLs they convert to opportunities, company friction is baked into the system: the marketing team meeting their goals is out of alignment with sales reaching their goals. 

Teams focusing on generating MQLs rather than revenue and demand will continue to struggle with alignment. They will leave themselves ill-prepared to run ABM campaigns or provide their customers with a seamless experience.

Solutions to the MQL Battle:

Reach out to your sales counterparts and have a conversation about how you can set up processes, regular stand ups, and other means of listening to and learning from each other.  

Sales can offer invaluable insights to marketing. For example, understanding the dynamics of conversations with MQLs unveils common objections the sales team frequently encounters. It also highlights which content assets resonate most during these discussions. Ideally, sales would proactively seek out marketing for content that significantly enhances sales engagement, fostering a collaborative environment where both teams thrive together.

On the other hand, sales can learn from their colleagues on the marketing side of the house. What content is marketing serving and why? How have they altered the targeting, and how is sales seeing it play out in sales calls? What content is consumed most in deals that result in “closed-won” outcomes? 

Once sales and marketing understand one another more, they can make informed choices that help both teams win. Once there is mutual understanding, the teams can begin to have conversations about important choices that can significantly impact the pipeline: 

• Should we focus on capturing MQLs or ungated content to drive demand? 
• Should we define an MQL differently than we currently do? 
• How can we support asynchronous buying and get prospects to SQL or sales-qualified opportunity (SQO) status before getting sales involved?  

This is a more productive line of questioning than "Why did you send me so many junk leads this month?" 

Running Successful ABM Plays

This series's final alignment challenge is running successful account-based marketing (ABM) plays with misaligned teams. At the end of the day, you just can't do it!

The problem areas outlined above – poor handoffs, disparate systems, inconsistent data, and arm wrestling over MQLs – prevent an organization from running successful ABM plays, especially at scale.  

Why is it so hard to knock your ABM goals out of the park when sales and marketing aren't talking? It's because ABM requires that you're not only aligned on one single MQL or SQL definition – you have to define an entire buying committee. This means even more handoffs, system, data, and goal alignment.

Solutions to ABM Alignment Issues:

If you are a HubSpot user, you likely know that you have a plethora of HubSpot tools to use for your ABM plays: 

• Target Account property 

• ICP Tier property 

• Account Overview 

• Suggested Target Account AI tool

• Prospects tool to see accounts who have visited your website 

• ABM and Target Account dashboards 

• Company scoring 

• Buyer Persona properties 

• Workflow automation 

• Chatbot or live chat 

• Automated lead rotation 

• Ads conversion events

Here are some steps you can take to align your team for ABM: 

• Verify that you have been collecting job titles and buying roles. If you have not, go back through your last quarter of closed deals and manually enter this information or update via workflows. For example, you can indicate that a specific job title is always a decision-maker. 

• Create a dashboard to understand the buying roles in your recent deals and who usually shows up at the buying table first.

• Have a meeting between sales and marketing to review this information and agree upon the buying committee and who to prioritize.

• Follow the solutions outlined above to ensure that your teams are aligned on goals, lifecycle stage definitions, and handoff protocol and that your data is clean and your systems are talking.

• Finally, use your Target Account and ABM tools to set up a campaign to support the alignment built between sales and marketing.

Who says that sales and marketing can't play well together? More often than not, alignment is within reach and takes some learning and listening, followed by consistent action.