A company's revenue growth and several other success parameters are mainly interconnected with the efficiency of its sales and marketing teams. However, most companies separately set the KPIs or Key Performance Indicators for the sales and marketing teams. This leads to misalignment between the two departments, which, in turn, leads to lower conversion and retention rates.
Different KPIs for the two departments mean that they do not usually need to work together to reach their goals. As a result, when the marketing team approaches a customer and then the sales team, they may get confused and turn away from the company. Now, when the repetition of such incidents leads to the company failing to reach its targets, the blame game begins.
The sales team will say that the marketing team is not churning out as many quality leads as it should. On the other hand, the marketing team will say that the sales team is unable to use the leads given to them properly. However, in many cases, the mistakes actually happen because of miscommunication and misaligned goals between the two departments.
Thus, harmonious collaboration between sales and marketing is critical in providing customers with a consistent, coherent message and experience. With buyers wielding the primary power, a discordant approach can lead to hesitation and lost sales. As a result, an alignment extending across marketing and sales efforts is essential for delivering a seamless customer journey and achieving overall business success.
If your company has separate KPIs for the sales and marketing teams, your employees do double the work towards different goals. Ultimately, your company's core goals may remain unachieved due to the different approaches from the different departments.
For example, your marketing team may focus on generating more leads, while the sales team may focus on closing deals. However, if their goals are not Integrated, the marketing team could relay one message to the customers while the sales team could focus on another message. Converting leads and retaining customers always means personally connecting with them. However, that gets compromised when two different approaches are at play.
On the other hand, the chances of miscommunication between the teams almost become zero with shared KPIs and dashboards to keep track of the customers' stages in the sales funnel. The shared KPIs can include conversions and retention rates, quotas, and revenue. Shared goals can be more effective and less time-consuming as the two teams work in synergy. This will also provide a good opportunity for your company to align the sales and marketing teams’ KPIs and approaches with your core values and objectives.
Generally, when integrating the sales and marketing teams' KPIs, the first sign of effectiveness is the increasing flow of quality leads from the marketing team to the sales team. While the integration process can seem complex, you can take note of companies that are already doing this and leading by example. One such example is how Cisco brought together its sales and marketing teams.
They did it in a few key steps to ensure both teams got used to their new realities. As per Karen Walker, Cisco’s CMO, the first step towards this was getting both teams to “...speak the same language.” They did this by providing them with common goals and metrics to work with. However, the road was not easy, as Cisco’s CMO stated. They anticipated the changing behavior in the customers’ digital dependency, like using social media, search engines, or vendor websites to find whatever they're searching for.
Seeing this inclination, Cisco changed its approach. Yet, things just weren’t falling into place. “We started using digital tactics that matched the buyers' desire to look for information online using search engines, vendor websites, and social media sites. But neither Sales nor Marketing was happy,” Walker said. They went on to turn away from traditional outbound marketing tactics and focused on Smarketing or Revenue Marketing, which united the sales and marketing teams.
Walker believed that once the sales and marketing teams were on the same page, the way forward was tuning operational systems to give visibility to results and continually refining processes. At Cisco, sales and marketing teams used standard reporting dashboards to hold each other accountable. Consequently, both teams listened and responded to feedback. It doesn't need to be mentioned that shared dashboards help keep track of the customers’ actions, achieved or unachieved KPIs, and feedback to one another, which can then be addressed unmistakably without miscommunication.
When Sales and Marketing collaborate seamlessly, the results are remarkable. By harmonizing both teams' KPIs and extending the sales funnel to encompass marketing, your organization can achieve higher revenue from marketing. Moreover, there is also a higher chance of impressive company revenue growth, resulting in an enhanced overall ROI.
Organizations with strong marketing and sales alignment have been proven to outperform those without key business metrics such as revenue, profit, and quota attainment, demonstrating the clear advantage that can be gained by integrating these functions.