The War Between Sales and Marketing & How Revenue Alignment Can Help

It’s no secret that marketing and sales have been wrestling to be on the same page for a long time. Recently, Linkedin released research that showed that up to 90 percent of sales and marketing professionals believe that they don’t have alignment.

With many working parts working concurrently to generate business success, solutions for consistent low revenue can be hard to address. A great solution to resolve any operational flaws is to analyze its Revenue Alignment strategy.

What is Revenue Alignment and Why Does It Matter?It’s the optimal coordination of the different departments that make up a business: Sales, Marketing, Finance, Support, etc.

Revenue alignment places the customer at the center of their priorities by directing all teams to have the primary goal of their complete satisfaction.

Research has shown that revenue alignment can drastically increase win rates.

● Alignment can lead to a 32% increase in year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth. (Aberdeen Group)
● Alignment can lead to 38% higher sales win rates. (MarketingProfs)

Now that we covered what revenue alignment is, let’s discuss ways we can accomplish this across departments.
How to ensure there’s alignment across departments: Marketing Aligned marketing entails focusing on the problems that your business’s solutions solve rather than advertising lists of product details.

As a business, you must be transparent and openly acknowledge any lapse in service or product faults.

Marketing must prioritize the preferences of the target consumer base and leverage these desires to attract new business.

Sales Aligned sales mean consulting customers on the exact ways a product can be used to address their pain points. They must often communicate their observed customer preferences and perceptions of the company internally. Finance Aligned finances require all payment and customer persona data to be analyzed and organized to provide insights to the rest of the company. This data informs the organization on user habits, changes in activity, and other shifts as a result of outside or internal factors.

Customer Success and Support – For Customer Success to align, they must ensure customers are able to make use of your product or service as promised. Success representatives should also monitor customers to ensure that the use of your product or service has a significant, measurable impact. Support representatives should be sincere in their appreciation of a customer pointing out an issue and seek to resolve it as quickly as possible.

Identify and find solutions for customers experiencing difficulties or weak points in their end result. How to measure your revenue alignment strategies? Revenue Alignment focuses on creating and analyzing measurable data from each department to deliver influential solutions that greatly benefit customers.

OKR (objectives and key results) systems can be implemented to aid in zeroing in on the most vital misalignments to tackle. To tighten the alignment of the ultimate business goals and outcomes between each department of the organization, OKRs show individual teams how their work impacts overall operational outcomes. OKRs cannot substitute strong executive leadership or creative work, but can aid in guiding the organization to higher certainty of revenue success. OKRs are a great way to plan objectives in QBR (Quarterly Business Planning) sessions. They encourage agreement across departments in order to align collectively towards a common goal. OKRs enable departments to easily communicate the identified misalignments or errors with the rest of the organization as they provide quantified observations. The structure and clarity provided by OKRs make the impact of aligning the operations in the organization more visible. When adapting the alignment of your organization to achieve predictable revenue growth, OKRs can play a great role in monitoring the operational efficiencies between departments.

Want to learn more about how to bring alignment across the different departments?
​
Join the Top Minds in Sales Development and Revenue Alignment at the next Tenbound Virtual Conference on September 8th diving into the greatest of go-to-market challenges – driving true Revenue Alignment!