How to Create Strong Sales and Marketing Alignment in 2024, According to LinkedIn's Global Product Marketing Leader
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Puppies and the park.
Beach days and ice cream.
Some things just obviously go together — but what if I put sales and marketing together in that list? Would you still think they worked better as a pair?
More than likely, you haven’t quite considered your sales and marketing to be the “peanut butter and jelly” of your company. But sales and marketing alignment is more critical than you think.
As LinkedIn’s Global Product Marketing Leader Taina Palombo-Price puts it, “The work that marketing does sets up the sales organization to do the part of the job that is theirs. You can’t do one without the other.”
Here, let’s explore tips from Palombo-Price to cultivate stronger sales and marketing alignment for your organization in 2024.
But first – Why does sales and marketing alignment matter, anyway?
Simply put, sales and marketing alignment matters because, while it might seem like they are two separate organizations focusing on separate goals, both teams fall under one go-to-market motion for your business.
“You’re still one team, even if you’re under two leaders, because you’re marching towards the same goal — or you should be,” Taina Palombo-Price told me.
Nowadays, buyers expect a cohesive, seamless buyer experience — which is an impossible feat if your sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned.
Plus, having strong sales and marketing alignment is critical for your business’ bottom line. In fact, sales professionals who say they are aligned with their marketing team are 106% more likely to say they are performing better than their sales goals this year.
But cultivating sales and marketing alignment — or creating a stronger, more cohesive process in 2024 — can be difficult to achieve. Let’s jump into some tips from Palombo-Price now.
How to Create Strong Sales and Marketing Alignment, According to LinkedIn’s Global Product Marketing Leader
1. Create goals that your sales and marketing teams can share.
Oftentimes, marketing teams are goaled on top-of-the-funnel metrics like traffic, leads, or brand awareness. But their job typically ends once they’ve created a net-new contact or lead for sales.
Sales, on the other hand, is goaled on closing deals and driving revenue.
This separation of goals, Palombo-Price told me, is oftentimes one of the biggest barriers to successful alignment between teams.
“If KPIs are separated instead of unified, that means people are working to satisfy the goals against which they get their paychecks. But the places I’ve seen sales and marketing alignment work most effectively is when those goals are tied together and teams are looking at revenue metrics across both sales and marketing together,” She says.
Palombo-Price adds, “And then you start to think about it as a funnel that’s actually connected, versus a set of disparate tasks that drive one set of KPIs.”
Source:: HubSpot Blog