Getting Marketing & Sales to work together
Starts with your north star ⭐️. Making sure that both teams are working towards the same goal is the first step to working better together.
It’s been a couple years since I’ve reached out so you probably don’t remember me but someday in your life you subscribed to my emails on pierrelechelle.com.
During that time I’ve been working with 150+ amazing brands like Amplitude, Segment, InVision, Algolia, Front, OpenClassrooms…
I’ve came to realize how important it is to align Sales & Marketing together. Which is why I’m reaching out to you today.
I want to help both of these teams get aligned to generate greater revenue.
If you’ve ever tried scaling a business, you know how tough it is to align them. They always have a different agenda and it’s killing your growth 🤯.
I’ll be sending these emails once or twice a month giving you actionnable tips on how you can unlock your growth and get to the next level. So let’s get to it!
What’s your North Star?
If your teams aren’t aligned, it’s often because they look at very different KPIs. Marketing looks at the number of leads while Sales only cares about bookings.
When Marketing teams focus on leads, here is what happens most of the time:
The worse that can happen is that Marketing wins (leads are growing) and Sales is loosing (bookings are staying flat, or worse, declining).
Generating leads is really easy. Generating leads who can convert is extremely hard.
Nobody cares that you’ve got 1300 leads this month. They’re just emails in a CRM. You can discuss the volume of leads with your team but nobody else in the business should care about that number.
Both teams needs to be look at the same metrics.
The role of Marketing is to open doors while sales should be closing them. If Sales aren’t meeting their targets, Marketing is failing at their mission.
Your north star should always be: Pipeline created / closed.
If your OKRs are including Lead Generation, maybe it’s a good time to review your goals to ensure they encourage the right actions.
Marketing should contribute to a % of total bookings. Then the discussion becomes: How much?
Do not get in a position where you’re talking about the number of leads. You should always be talking about pipeline. 💰
Hang on! You don’t report on leads or MQLs?
No! We don’t do lead scoring either. What really matters is how many contact requests we get who fit our ICP.
Of course we try to have a wider reach and to create content but we don’t obsess over how many people read it.
Having that focus on pipeline enables us to focus on what matters: feeding our sales team with quality demo requests (thus creating pipeline).
When you report on leads, what happens most of the time is that you start acquiring unqualified leads to meet your numbers.
You may not do it intentionally. Like you’re targeting Enterprise and you’ve got lots of SMBs to download your content.
If you really want to report on leads and MQLs, you should only count the ones who fit your ICP. That means that you need to collect data to know if they fit your ICP (e.g. asking for “company size”).
If you target companies with 1k+ employees, you should never count an SMB.
Otherwise you’ll always end up with inflated numbers. You’ll think you’re doing amazingly well but in reality, your efforts aren’t targeting the right folks.
This is going to be much harder but you’ll be focusing on the right thing.
Don’t worry about “looking good”, if your metrics are showing that you’re struggling, it’s a good thing. It means you’ve got work to do 😉.
But again, this is only if you really need to report on leads. The only thing you should really care about is pipeline created.
What do you think?
Sales & Marketing alignment is a subject that fascinates me but I’m curious to hear about you. What keeps you up at night?
Let me know and I’ll cover it in the next issue. Until then, I really look forward to hearing your thoughts!