Three key areas where marketing operations and sales operations need to agree on

Before we talk about the three alignment areas, lets ensure we agree on the general scope of marketing operations and sales operations. 

Marketing Operations is the function of the marketing organization (including people, process, technology, and data) that enables Marketing to operate efficiently and to scale with quality and consistency. Marketing Operations function typically owns the marketing technology infrastructure including marketing automation systems; customer marketing database; creation and execution of campaigns through the marketing automation system; marketing lead flow process; and marketing analytics and reporting.  

Sales operations, on the other hand own processes, technology, and resources to support, enable, and drive front-line sales teams to sell better, faster, and more efficiently.  These include sales forecasting; sales incentives; enablement including right messaging, product knowledge and sales methodology adoption; CRM system including its ownership, adoption and usage; sales territory planning/assignment; and sales reporting/analytics/dashboards.

While these two are distinct functions within most organizations, there are three areas where they need to work together and be aligned.  When the two organizations are not in sync, the result can be seen in poor pipeline. As a marketing consultant to the CMO in the last 15 years, this is where I used to spend a lot of my time to drive alignment and ensure pipeline issues get addressed.

• Process: The two organizations must agree on the end to end process for the lead life-cycle – MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) to SAL (Sales Accepted lead) to an opportunity.  They should also clearly define the re-qualification/re-nurture process, as well as SLAs (for how long sales should try to qualify a lead before it is returned back to marketing for nurture).  So much finger pointing happens when a lead crosses from marketing ownership to sales ownership and this SLA is not clearly defined – whether it is at SQL or SAL level – depending on your specific process. Marketing complains that sales is not acting on the leads it sends, while sales cherry picks the leads and the rest stay in the processing queue forever.  Finally, they should agree on how marketing is going to ensure they are building awareness and pipeline in the specific target accounts that the sales organization is going after in their go-to-market.  I have seen this to be an area of big disconnect – where sales is targeting specific accounts and marketing takes a geographic approach to marketing.

• Technology: The two organizations own their respective systems – the marketing automation system and the CRM system.  However, these systems are wired to stay in sync, so it is important that the two teams agree on a governance process for the data between the two systems. For example, how do you manage the process around sales reps wanting to upload lists of contacts in their target accounts that, then get synced to marketing system and potentially may violate GDPR rules?  How do you ensure sales does not email a contact without permission from them., if they have opted out of marketing emails?  Which system is the owner of the golden record about the contact and what is the process to protect its integrity? Finally, it is important that the sales and marketing analytics agree on the metrics and their results, so the two organizations don’t have a different version of the truth.

• Pipeline: How often do you hear marketing state that they met their pipeline generation targets, while sales complains of not enough pipeline. Challenge is often three-fold – a) the two organizations have a different definition of “pipeline” which needs to be resolved or b) they may be looking at different analytics that provide completely different answers and c) while marketing may be looking at aggregate numbers – but at the sales rep level there may be feast or famine.  The marketing organization needs to look at pipeline at the sales rep level and ensure each has at least 2.5X pipe at the beginning of the quarter in order to hit their individual numbers.  The actual multiplier needed may vary from company to company, based on the nature of the business.

These are the three key areas you need alignment at the operations level within the sales and marketing organizations to ensure good marketing ROI (in terms of business generated by the sales organization).  In the next blog posts, I will talk about some of broader areas of alignment needed between sales and marketing – not just at operations/systems level.