Revenue Alignment - How it May Be Broken and How You Can Fix It

You see it all the time. The CEO has a vision and OKRs for the company, yet John on the Customer Success team doesn't know how it matters to his role.

It’s like the sales leader who is asking for more marketing-sponsored webinars and events, while the marketing team is more focused on traditional collateral like one pagers,  Google ads, and pitch decks.

Each department goes off pursuing its individual goals, only ever sharing results at the end of the quarter. And then it’s too late to make adjustments.

These companies should start to consider making structural changes that better align the organization around a single source of truth and shared goals. But how?

What is Revenue Alignment?

In our recent article highlighting common themes from our upcoming conference, we leverage John Moore’s definition of Revenue alignment as “a customer-centered approach to business success. It places a bonus on creating measurable outcomes, delivering solutions that customers adopt, and a high degree of collaboration between customer-facing teams.”

Here we will dive a bit deeper into the importance of revenue alignment, some pitfalls to avoid, and a couple of ways to fix them.

The goal of revenue alignment is to improve the customer experience your customer receives from your team from start to finish. As you can imagine, this involves sales leaders, marketing, customer success, HR, Finance, and enablement. Each company must work really hard to remove any friction in the process.

As we’ve noted, greater alignment across the organization shows great benefit. Research showed that organizations that “maintain a focus on alignment achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth and up to 15% higher profitability.” 

Unfortunately, few teams ever get there. Based on our research, here are some ways that prevent companies from getting the revenue growth that they desire.

Problems of revenue mis-alignment:

• Most teams have siloed data which causes friction 
• Blaming and finger-pointing between teams wastes time and money 
• Only thinking that Marketing, Sales, and Customer success are the only revenue teams that need to be aligned (you need everything from Finance to HR as well - every team!)

The good news is that there is hope. We’ve seen some companies turn things around in just a week. While we can’t promise such a fast result, we can help you on your journey of revenue alignment. And yes, this will always be a process, a journey, and not a one-time event.

How are some ways to align your revenue teams:

• Be very clear on why this is important for your business. Having a strong why goes a long way.
• Ensure that each team understands how its goals and metrics align with achieving the broader team vision.
• Identify any friction, siloed data, and resources, then work to remove them.
• Seek out areas where team goals may be in conflict with each other and fix those.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate! It’s best to over-communicate the vision and its importance.
• Work to get buy-in from each department.
• Be agile. Move fast to correct things when they aren’t working.
• Define key metrics and work towards aligning compensation models, so that each person has the right motivation.
• Implement, test, and repeat the above until you get your desired results.

As we’ve shown, aligning your revenue teams can provide a huge lift in profitability. As teams struggle with data and organizational silos, misalignment will result in a negative impact on productivity and, ultimately, revenue growth.

To learn more about how to start this process for your team, come join some of the Top Minds in Revenue Alignment on September 8th at Tenbound’s next Virtual Conference!
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At this free event, we’ll cover everything you need to rev up your cross-functional, go-to-market teams by synchronizing pipeline and revenue generation. Attendees will learn from top names in the industry on a strategic and tactical level how to actually do Revenue Alignment vs just talking about it. Focusing on alignment can increase pipeline and revenue, and enhance their careers as revenue professionals. For more info and free registration click here.