Sales and Marketing: Finding Common Ground through Metrics

The root cause of misalignment between sales and marketing teams is the belief that marketing should be strategic. So says Neil Rackham, author of the perennial best-seller Spin Selling (McGraw-Hill, 1988).

“Marketing usually starts as a sales-support function but then goes on to become ever more strategic and atmospheric,” he explains. “They become more interested in branding and segmentation strategies and sensing the future, so they become less measurable and begin talking different language from the people in the trenches.”

One solution is to start measuring marketing and sales using the same metrics. That’s where Sales 2.0 solutions come in. “You need to start making decisions based on science rather than hunches, and that means getting sales and marketing reading from the same playbook,” said Selling Power publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco earlier this year, where speakers shared how they use metrics to bring sales and marketing closer together.

For example, top management at the systems integration firm Appirio brought the sales and marketing teams together to agree on exactly what constituted a valid lead, and then used the Marketo software application to measure the progress of those leads through the pipeline. When metrics are built around a common definition, sales and marketing teams are “forced to remain on the same page,” according to Kirk Crenshaw, the company’s director of marketing. That, in turn, helped the marketing team focus on getting the right leads, resulting in a 195 percent growth in the number of qualified leads entering the firm’s pipeline.

Similarly, the marketing firm Corporate Visions Inc. uses the Brainshark package to disseminate consistent marketing materials throughout the organization and to its customers. The company then uses Marketo to track how the opportunities generated by the materials move through the pipeline. Measuring the customer response allows the firm to better tune its marketing materials, thereby making them more effective over time. As a result, nearly half of the company’s qualified sales leads now come from marketing activities, which previously were responsible for virtually no qualified leads whatsoever.

In both cases, aligning sales and marketing depended on having both groups use the same technology to measure the same metrics. Because the most important metrics are financial, this requires marketing groups to become both cognizant of and responsible for revenue, according to Phil Fernandez, president and CEO of Marketo.

“We’ve found that the right metrics can help companies better understand what’s going on throughout the revenue cycle,” he says. “These analytics provide insight to what’s working and what isn’t and are a great way to bring marketing and sales together around the common objective of revenue.”

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