{"id":1502,"date":"2024-06-04T19:20:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-04T19:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/saasboomi.codecrane.com\/?p=1502"},"modified":"2024-09-12T07:37:03","modified_gmt":"2024-09-12T07:37:03","slug":"all-about-marketing-and-sales-alignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.matsio.com\/matsio\/saasboomi\/saas\/marketing\/all-about-marketing-and-sales-alignment\/","title":{"rendered":"Sales <> Marketing: Let There Be Conflict"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lockdown, webinars, virtual meetings, and boredom by metrics. That\u2019s what the last 56 days have been for me. Amid all this, I have also been enjoying solving jigsaw puzzles and getting acquainted with Peppa Pig and her family with my daughter, and not to forget adding the disinfectant to the water while mopping the floor! There was a sense of FOMO when Instagram was filled with my colleagues\u2019 culinary trial runs, but after a couple of mishaps, there was certainly a JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) so I decided to stick to just playing to my strengths.<\/p>\n

Talk about a new normal, and the routine that got set, I was also missing interacting with a large set of folks, until Sachin from Ameyo and I interacted to understand what it takes for sales and marketing to be in sync. Well, that\u2019s certainly an oxymoron and every CEO\u2019s unfulfilled dream. It certainly made for a great topic at SaaSBoomi\u2019s Growth<\/a> edition where over 200 participants attended coming from over 75 startups (from an application of 300 startups that had to be curated for restricted entry). He told me about the panel he was going to moderate, and I was like \u201cLet\u2019s do this!\u201d (virtually though)<\/p>\n

I spoke about the Sales and Marketing love in the SMB world, while Almitra from CleverTap articulated it beautifully from an enterprise perspective while Rajesh (Whatfix) and Naven KY (Chargebee) were Sales ops strikers who nailed the importance of Brahma having the last word. Brahma? Yes, I\u2019ll come to that in a few paragraphs from now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Let\u2019s just put it out there. Marketing folks are more data-driven, are highly analytical, and campaigns always looking to plan for the future. Sales on the other hand work with different kinds of customers and switch gears between being emotional and rational based on customer\u2019s needs, and their only aim is to close, thereby living in the present. It is just impossible to get them to work together. But it is certainly possible to lay some ground rules and keep the objective very clear- Revenue.<\/p>\n

So, what does it take for an SMB marketing team to tango with the Sales team? First, let\u2019s look at how sales and marketing in the SMB world have evolved over a period of time. Our session also aimed at answering the \u201cWhere should the SDR \/ BDR report be? Should it evolve over time?<\/p>\n

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Marketing and Sales Team Structures<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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Sales<\/strong>: It\u2019s always easy, you grow a sales team as and when we have the opportunity to extract more from a sales territory. You end up slicing the cake vertically for deeper focus as against covering a larger area when you are starting off. As you grow your business, you also have to have hunters and farmers to successfully execute a land and expand strategy.<\/p>\n

Marketing<\/strong>: For the rest of the blog, I shall talk about marketing only in the context of lead gen and growth marketing. To have a better sync, for SMB marketing to be successful, it is best to mimic a sales org, but that\u2019s not going to be possible instantly as you start off. As you start off the business of lead gen, your only aim is to generate leads, and there are 2 important teams- Digital marketing (if you are in the business of inbound marketing<\/a>, wanting to scale your share in your business category) comprising of SEO teams<\/a> (you don\u2019t want to burn money from Day1) and a paid marketing team to accentuate your SEO efforts. As you grow your business, it\u2019s best suited for BDRs in the SDR org to be a part of marketing. More about it soon down.<\/p>\n

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Sales and marketing performance indicators don\u2019t change<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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\u201cRevenue solves all known problems\u201d \u2014 Eric Smith<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Sales<\/strong>: It\u2019s all about MRR in an inbound SMB business. The teams are measured monthly on the $$ that they bring to the bank and the number of logos acquired. As you acquire more logos, you also have an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell subscriptions of your product(s).<\/p>\n

Marketing<\/strong>: We were very clear on what a North Star metric for for marketing \u2014 Free Trials. Choose your North Star metric that propels your sales. It could be demos, or someone filling up the contact us form- but that should be the sacrosanct metric every marketer should be measured against. The point of conflict been sales and marketing is always the differentiation in success metrics. To speak the common language, make sure your marketing has a good understanding of revenue, and so tag revenue as a soft metric of measurement in the marketing camp as well. It works!<\/p>\n

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Complexity in Targets matures as you grow older<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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It\u2019s never easy to get sales and marketing to speak the same dialect, but the language is the same.<\/p>\n

When I joined Freshdesk then in 2015, we had the sales and marketing interlock session on the 25th of December to discuss the 2016 plans. As facile as it may sound, the sales multiplied the no. of sales folks with the leads per person (approx 350- free trials then), and arrived at the leads to be generated for 2016. We (marketing) negotiated that based on a couple of year\u2019s history of lead-gen and arrived at a \u201cmutually agreeable\u201d leads to be generated, but as you are experimenting, and setting up systems, such planning is thrown out of the window. When the planned revenue is achieved, everything may sound \u201cwell planned\u201d. As we grew in our 10th year of operation,<\/p>\n

Sales<\/strong>: continue to plan for monthly revenue, but the complexity added are by:<\/p>\n