The RevOps Secret To Aligning Marketing & Sales

The theoretical idea is that marketing and sales should be aligned, especially when the company in question is rapidly selling in volume. Yet, the practical scenario in the B2B SaaS industry differs vastly from the theoretical one.

There are numerous challenges to sales and marketing misalignment in the B2B SaaS industry. It could be the friction between the sales and marketing teams, leading to a blame game for missing and poor leads. It could also be the new CMO or Sales VP introducing ideas incompatible with the other team. 

It goes without saying that management changes can cause a lot of chaos for RevOps teams. Rapid system reconfigurations, reallocating accounts in line with fresh go-to-market strategies, and observing the fallout of aborted account-based initiatives - all these and more add to the RevOps headache.

Yet, the relative stability of the RevOps team compared to the high turnover in sales and marketing leadership can only mean one thing - it is crucial for RevOps to prioritize Sales and Marketing alignment. By gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges and demands faced by these leaders, RevOps can help them protect and enhance their initiatives and minimize disruptive changes for all stakeholders.

The Fight Between Sales & Marketing

Don’t get us wrong - marketing and sales leaders are not always in conflict! Most successful leaders of these two departments find a way to work with each other or avoid getting into each other’s domain. Believe it or not, they actually acknowledge the challenging nature of their counterpart’s position. The story differs for rookie and inexperienced leaders, who can be identified by their finger-pointing habits. 

However, despite the fact that there are experienced and empathetic leaders, sales and marketing sometimes clash in some scenarios. The nature of their conflicting goals makes it necessary for great leaders to find a balance between the two teams. This balance can be achieved through give-and-take policies. Unfortunately, if a compromise isn’t reached, the damage to both teams and the company can be extensive.

Let’s talk about salespeople and their repeated short-term goals. Just to make a reasonable income, sales reps must hit a certain target. This target can be monthly, quarterly, or even yearly. What happens when they don’t hit the target? Unfortunately, they get fired for not realizing their full earning potential.

Unlike the constant stress of sales, marketers are longer-term players. As a rule of thumb, most of their tools take a minimum of 90 days to show effective results. Take the case of digital marketing. When you have a problem-solving product for your customer base, digital marketing can work wonders in raising awareness. On the flip side, it doesn’t really work when it comes to people requesting demos. Despite being long-term players, marketers also face pressure and have to justify their long-term strategies.

A well-designed ad campaign can yield significant results, including increased brand recognition and a lift in leads from various channels, within a relatively short span of six months. As prospects become aware of your brand, they are more likely to engage with it, whether through webinar attendance, chat-based demo requests, or in-person interactions at events. 

Thus, this is where marketing becomes all-important: 

Simple investments in effective advertising => brand awareness and engagement boost => increased revenue and customer acquisition.

The repeated complaint from sales is that marketing doesn’t really do much to help close their deals. They are not wrong, to be fair. Marketing generates leads they believe have potential, while sales and their sub-departments are responsible for converting those leads into customers. Here, teams must remember that the ideal situation of aligned sales and marketing goals, with clear communication on timelines and expectations, can benefit both teams.

Obviously, when departments perform poorly in consecutive quarters or more, CEOs firing such underperforming leaders is standard practice. What’s worse is that blurry job descriptions and overlapping work domains make it hard to pinpoint who's to blame for bad quarters.‍ 

Consequently, most marketing, sales, or customer success executives usually stay at the helm for an average of 1.5 to 2.1 years. That is drastically lower than the average of 4 to 6 years for CFOs and CEOs. Thus, it goes without saying that conflict between executives is natural when failure has such severe repercussions. Now, the roles of senior leaders handling this conflict are directly dependent on the effectiveness of RevOps in aligning the concerned departments.

The RevOps Approach For Collaborating Leaders

RevOps can play a vital role in a company’s growth only if the sales and marketing leaders are willing to work together. In such instances, RevOps secures the smooth running of the go-to-market (GTM) team. After all, committed and experienced leaders are always eager to learn RevOps insights that help them increase their teams' skill sets and eliminate their weaknesses. 

Apart from this primary GTM objective, RevOps becomes the savior as the coordinating factor between teams when any of the following occurs:

• Lower pipeline production
• Decrease in lead volume falls
• Opportunity velocity falls
• Decrease in Lead to qualified opportunity conversion
• Increase in churn rates
• Decrease in close rates

In the case of pipeline production dipping, RevOps can raise the flag early and ensure that marketing teams have the time and resources to increase the lead volume. On the other hand, RevOps can help understand how falling close rates are indicative of market or product issues. Let’s not forget the function of sales enablement in diagnosing underperforming teams and decreasing velocity rates.‍

For GTM teams, RevOps should maintain active and regular communications and propose new projects that lead to higher working efficiencies. Such steps can be quickly taken through data reviews at regular intervals with functional leads. Thus, the RevOps way is to look for new trends and advise on the next steps.

The RevOps Approach For Imbalanced Power Dynamic

There are occasions when the disadvantageous position of a particular go-to-market leader is quite evident. Such imbalanced power dynamics are caused by several reasons: 

• These executives are excluded from planning meetings held at the leadership level without much notice.
• Other leadership executives are conspiring not to let that particular executive properly handle some of their duties.

The conflict is more subtle the majority of the time. If someone is planning or being asked to leave, that leader may suddenly take vacation days during Quarterly Board Reviews. Yet, there have been cases where marketing and sales teams despise each other despite the surface-level friendship of their leaders. 

So, what does RevOps do when the conflict becomes too much? Instead of aligning itself with the team with the upper hand, RevOps should work to solve or compromise a solution between the teams.

How? Say one of the executives is smarter than the other and asks more relevant questions about the other team. Instead of announcing the intellect of that leader and hurting egos, RevOps can be the go-between for collaborating on the needed research. Remember that you can get all the necessary information by simply implying that questions are being asked. Sometimes, this will incentivize the underdog team and leader to up their game. Either way, RevOps comes out of this as the winner due to gaining more knowledge and being acknowledged as a team player.

We recommend companies get involved in projects that can lead to inefficiencies being outed. However, this mustn’t look like a witch hunt for the inefficient leader and the team. With the help of the CMO, such initiatives can be tactfully masked as the doing of the RevOps team to grow the company.

Now, missed goals can never be attributed to the fault of one single team. More often than not, missed goals show complicated problems that can only be solved through cross-functional and coordinated processes. Here’s why goals can be missed:

• Lack of proper selling methodology
• Irrelevant messaging to highlight your product to the target base
• Product problems
• Wrong market perception

Organizations often overlook the deeper systemic issues that prevent a cohesive go-to-market strategy in their haste to assign blame for misalignment between sales and marketing. Rather than identifying and addressing the root causes, these companies may replace go-to-market leaders multiple times, delaying the implementation of a lasting, sustainable solution. It may be too late before such companies recognize and accept that one individual is unlikely to be the sole cause of their problem.

The RevOps Approach For Warring Leaders

In many dysfunctional and inefficient companies, the conflict between sales and marketing has reached the level of mud-slinging on social media. RevOps can only do so much if the company's work culture has reached such toxicity levels. Sooner or later, the conflict will come under the notice of the CEO or the CFO, leading to the termination of the services of one or both of the leaders.

Despite potential pushback from immature leaders, regular data reviews remain an important cornerstone of RevOps' value proposition. Establishing and consistently tracking key performance metrics and setting benchmarks creates a foundation for data-driven decision-making. This framework offers insights into current performance and demonstrates the team's efficacy to incoming functional leaders, positioning RevOps as a valuable asset for the company's future growth and success.

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The Bottom Line?

The success of an organization hinges on the seamless alignment between marketing and sales teams, and RevOps holds the key to achieving this delicate balance. Through effective communication, shared KPIs, collaborative process design, and data-driven decision-making, marketing and sales can work together to drive growth, increase revenue, and improve customer satisfaction.

Remember, RevOps has to be aligned and in sync with the policies decided for the company's growth. It doesn’t matter if the two teams don’t want to solve their issues and reach a compromise. RevOps can instead work with the other leadership group members, such as the CEO, the CRO, and the COO.