Is your Marketing Organization targeting the right prospects?

Sales-marketing alignment in any organization is critical if you want to hit your bookings targets consistently.   I talked about it in my previous posts and will continue to write about it my upcoming posts. One of the metrics of  sales-marketing alignment is what % of your SQLs are coming from your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?  

An account in your ideal customer profile (ICP) is likely to be one of the following:

• A named target-account (with the right firmographic profile) that your sales organization is going after. 
• An non-named account that is likely to buy your products i.e. have an affinity for your products.  A non-named account is situated in one of your sales rep's territory and is likely to be from the industry and revenue band you are targeting. You can leverage account scoring technologies in products such as Data Fox or ZoomInfo to create your list of non-named regional accounts who have affinity for your products.  
• An existing customer, who you are trying to cross-sell one of your other products to.
• One of the accounts, where a key influencer purchased your products when they were at their previous company. They know your products, were successful with it before and hence are comfortable purchasing it again.  This is especially a good ICP criteria, if you have a cross-industry product.

If at least 80% percent of your SQLs/MQLs (depending on your org, it represents the status of the leads when they are sent from marketing to sales for acceptance and conversion to sales opportunities) meet the attributes listed above, then your marketing and sales organizations are aligned on go-to-market. And that is a very good sign.  The remaining 20% of the accounts being passed to sales can be  either from new industries you are looking to penetrate in future (and are testing water), or new use-cases you are trying to take to market (and hence don’t fit your ICP), or accounts that your channel partners are bringing to you because of their close relationships or perhaps from customers who are on the early adopter spectrum and are exploring new use cases for your technology, or accounts that are not in your marketing/sales database, but meet the ICP criteria.

If the ratio is below 80%, then your field marketing organization may have some work to do in three areas - getting alignment with Sales on ICP, creating the right sales target account list and marketing database of ICPs and then targeting the marketing programs towards that database. Otherwise you are likely to see either a lower conversion of SQLs to sales opportunities (so a lower ROI for your marketing spend), or a larger percentage of stalled opportunities in early-stages of sales cycle or a higher number of competitive losses to vendors you should not be competing with.  All of these affect the amount of healthy sales pipeline generated for future quarters.