Revenue Team Therapy - A True Story of Sales and Marketing Alignment

Saima

A True Story of Sales and Marketing Alignment

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Achieving a tight-knit alignment between sales and marketing truly is the foundation for revenue success. Yet, for many teams, it feels like a puzzle missing a piece.

The payoff for those who achieve true alignment makes it worth the effort it takes to build. Cohesive revenue teams hit their new customer acquisition targets almost three times as often as others, according to Gartner.

It's a clear signal: getting sales and marketing to move together is essential for standout performance.

As head of marketing at 6sense, I have an insider’s view into what makes for good revenue team alignment — both by seeing it on our own team and by learning from some of our most successful customers. Here’s what I’ve learned about the key tenets that ensure marketing and sales are efficient and well-choreographed across the board.

“One Team” Mentality

Aligning sales and marketing starts with a mindset that we are all stewards of the pipeline. For both teams to be workingtoward the same goals, it’s essential to set strategy based on shared data.

That begins with agreeing on who your ideal customer profile (ICP) accounts are based on data (firmographic, technographic, or historical success data, for example).

From there, you can further refine your list to the ICP accounts that are showing intent. Intent data helps you determine where accounts are in their buying journey. That’s the basis for a shared funnel that delineates how and when marketing and sales should engage with accounts and where the handoff should occur. This is key to true integration between teams. In fact, the most common cause organizations cite for poor revenue team alignment is disparate sales and marketing funnels.




Early Intent Stages: Marketing Takes the Lead

In the early buying stages, represented above as Target, Awareness, and Consideration, marketing works to drive up intent by providing information and education through display ads, nurture sequences, events, direct mail, etc. At the same time, they enrich databases with persona information and acquire any contacts that aren’t currently in the CRM so sales can engage as soon as the account qualifies.

Opportunity Stages: Sales Takes the Lead

Once an account shows enough intent to be qualified as being in the Decision or Purchase stage, sales jumps in. This is considered a “revenue moment” — the discrete point in time when sales outreach is most likely to result in a deal. Acting at precisely the right time improves win rates and opportunity creation, and it’s only possible because of tight alignment and clearly defined handoffs.

Agree on What Good Looks Like

With this clear understanding of how and when each team engages with accounts, you can determine what leads to successful deals so you can do more of it.

Leading Indicators: Marketing-led stage

·       Proportion of web traffic coming from ICP accounts

·       Contact coverage

·       Account reach

·       # of Engaged personas

Leading Indicators: Sales-led stage

·       Response times

·       Conversion rates at each stage of the funnel

·       Conversion velocity

With this data, you can set expectations based on what good looks like for you — ideal response times for inside sales teams, or type and volume of content for enablement teams, for example.

Next, communicate those expectations to the right teams to ensure everyone understands what’s expected of them. It can be very helpful to have shared dashboards as a single source of truth, providing real-time performance data to compare against expectations.

Inspect, Inspect, Inspect

Next, close the loop and ensure that those expectations are being adhered to. That’s how you ensure there’s no ambiguity and that everyone is working together like a well-oiled machine.

If you create a culture of transparency in which everyone is on the lookout for shortfalls and (this is the important part) works together to address them, you can avoid defensiveness and reinforce the one-team mentality.

This goes back to the philosophy that we’re all stewards of the pipeline: Only when we know about a problem can we put a plan in place to address it and hit our pipeline number.

The leadership team should also have a defined operating rhythm for inspection. Decide on a regular cadence for leadership meetings, identify who should attend, and make sure you have key-decision makers in the room so you can take meaningful action based on the data you’re reviewing.

Success of This Approach

The approach I’ve laid out here is the one we use at 6sense. It’s been wildly successful in creating one of the most well-aligned and high-functioning revenue teams I’ve ever come across.

Here’s just one example of how it has played out for us. We looked at our data and determined that when our business development representatives (BDRs) reached out early after an account crossed over into the Decision/Purchase stage, we had a much higher conversion rate. Furthermore, we knew that when three or more personas were engaged in a deal, our win rates increased 55%.

With that data in our arsenal, we defined our SLA for BDR outreach: They are expected to reach out to at least three contacts on an account within 20 minutes of when it enters the Decision/Purchase stage.

From there, we inspected adherence to those expectations through our shared dashboards and biweekly leadership meetings.

The effectiveness of the approach was evident: Within three months, we achieved 4x faster responses. Not only that, but our outbound win rates are now even higher than our inbound ones. The end result was an improved experience for both the marketing and sales teams, and, most importantly, for our customers and prospects.

Ideas Are Easy. Execution Is Everything.

Sales and marketing alignment is so much more than a feel-good goal. It’s a practical necessity for organizations that want to thrive and scale. By fostering a "One Team" mentality, setting clear expectations, and continuously refining processes based on shared data, revenue teams can significantly enhance their customer acquisition and retention rates. The rewards of alignment are real: improved efficiency, higher win rates, and ultimately, a better customer experience.