The Comprehensive Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment

Get practical strategies and expert advice on how to promote sales and marketing alignment in your business.

April 2, 2024 —

The 6sense Team

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Identifying the Root Cause of Misalignment

Chapter 3

Strategies for Effective Sales and Marketing Alignment

Chapter 4

Establish Revenue as the Ultimate Metric for Alignment Success

Chapter 5

Shared Goals and Modern Metrics

Chapter 6

Building a Culture of Sales and Marketing Alignment

Chapter 7

Sustaining Alignment: Celebrate Wins and Ensure Regular Check-Ins

Chapter 8

Using Technology to Align Sales and Marketing

Chapter 1

Introduction

On the surface, sales and marketing alignment is a straightforward proposition: get your teams on the same page for the greater good of your business.

But it’s rarely that simple. That’s because the great divide between these teams often stems from deep-rooted systematic problems. Problems that breed complex, ongoing issues, like:

Siloed teams, data, and technology
Divergent goals
Incompatible strategies, and
Deeply inefficient workflows

To overcome this division — and the pipeline-wrecking waste it often creates — marketing and sales need to align on everything. Right from target prospects and goals, through to bringing home revenue.

Making the choice to win or lose together requires change — to your culture, processes, and tech. But teams that successfully take the leap will reap rewards, in pipeline, and revenue (and pay rises).

This guide explores the steps you can take to promote sales and marketing alignment, featuring insights from experts who’ve put the theory into practice.

Chapter 2

Identifying the Root Cause of Misalignment

Day-to-day, it’s easy to blame our marketing or sales counterparts when things aren’t going to plan.

Sales thinks marketing is serving up low-quality leads. Marketing blames sales for wasting opportunities. It’s a B2B Groundhog Day — a frustrating waste of time, money, and energy.

But the real root problem isn’t your colleagues. The origin of sales and marketing misalignment is outdated systems and ways of working.

Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

For decades, B2B marketers have relied on marketing automation platforms (MAPs) that prioritize leads, mostly generated through website forms. With leads perceived as a measure of success, marketers inevitably got hooked on MQLs.

But there’s a problem with this MQL dependency. Namely, it doesn’t reflect the way B2B businesses buy today, here’s why:

MQLs rely largely on contacts filling out forms on your site. In reality, 97% of web visitors choose to remain anonymous.
MQLs depend on buyers coming to your site. But Gartner estimates 83% of B2B solution research is performed away from your site.
Today’s B2B buyers research and purchase as groups, not individuals. A single MQL isn’t a good indicator of an account’s interest.

Combined, these B2B buying truths make MQLs extremely ineffective. We’re talking a lead-to-close rate of less than 1%. And this poor performance breeds resentment and misalignment.

Take a closer look at why MQLs breed misalignment with Kerry Cunningham

No One Wins with MQLs

Old-school first-touch and lead-based attribution practices aren’t relevant in a world where B2B deals are decided by anonymous buying groups.

These simplistic, outdated measures fail to show marketing’s wider influence on B2B buyers. They ignore meaty marketing contributions across brand, internal enablement, and customer marketing.

What’s more, even when marketing creates an abundance of MQLs, sales aren’t satisfied. They’ve been burned by lousy lead-to-close rates and learned to mistrust MQLs. In an excerpt from our CRO Latané Conant’s book No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, our SVP Sales, Mark Ebert writes:

“Sales teams don’t trust the leads that marketing provides… they’re either arbitrarily scored and not actually based on real signals of interest or intent, or they come to the sales team so late that even if we act on them right away, we’re too late to get into the deal. Our sellers know this. They see that MQLs don’t convert, and so they start to ignore them.”

Mark Ebert

SVP Sales, 6sense

When sales teams ignore MQLs, or complain about their quality, this leads to finger pointing on both sides. Cracks in the revenue team start to deepen.

Despite teams’ distrust of MQLs, without a clear alternative, most revenue teams’ solution to the MQL quality problem is more. More ads, more campaigns, more leads.

But quantity can’t compensate for quality. And so the cycle of disappointment, waste, and misalignment continues.

To really get marketing and sales on the same page, it’s time to fundamentally rethink our strategies.

Chapter 3

Strategies for Effective Sales and Marketing Alignment

Shift Focus From Leads to Targeted Accounts

Once we recognize the way modern B2B buyers operate, a fundamental shift is required — from focusing on leads to prioritizing targeted accounts.

As Kerry Cunningham, 6sense’s Head of Research and Thought Leadership, explains: “Marketing and sales should focus their time, attention, and budgets on mutually agreed-upon cohorts of accounts, which are assessed to be the best-fit prospects to become profitable customers. This principle forms the backbone of account-centric or account-based practices.”

It starts with agreeing on the accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and you want to target together. As the basis of your go-to-market motion this can’t be based on guesswork or the urge to close huge logos. Instead, analyze data on your revenue team’s past performance to understand:

The types of companies you’re a good fit for, and
The kinds of deals most likely to close

The process of defining your target account list is a great deal easier with a helping hand from AI. In fact, AI can go a step further and recommend ideal accounts looking to buy right now.

Here, Saima Rashid, 6sense’s SVP of Marketing and Revenue Analytics, walks through how we apply AI at 6sense to pick our target accounts:

By using data and AI to pick in-market best-fit accounts, we can step away from MQLs and arbitrary lead-scoring to focus our efforts on the prospects most likely to deliver revenue.

Chapter 4

Establish Revenue as the Ultimate Metric for Alignment Success

If marketing and sales aren’t working towards the same goals, they’ll naturally pull in different directions.

For most companies, the ultimate goal is revenue. So when all roads lead to revenue, surely it makes sense to align sales and marketing on metrics tied to this goal.

In Chapter 5 of No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, our VP of Revenue Operations, Kory Geyer, lays out the steps marketing and sales can take to align on pipeline and revenue:

Step 1: To implement a unified pipeline model, define:

Which accounts to target
Who is responsible for each stage of the buying journey
How to measure the performance in each stage of the funnel

Step 2: Define funnel stages in an account-based model, such as:

Marketing-qualified accounts
Sales discovery
Sales-qualified accounts
Closed/won

Step 3: When aligning marketing and sales to focus on the right accounts:

Define your ideal customer profile (all accounts marketing and sales jointly target) by analyzing past performance and future GTM strategy.

Past performance includes where you have success based on firmographic and technographic characteristics
Future GTM strategy includes product, sales territory coverage, and revenue plans
Define behaviors that trigger sales activity

Step 4: When setting account-based pipeline targets and measuring performance:

Revenue, stage duration, stage velocity, and average deal size inputs are needed to determine targets for each stage. Bring revenue leaders together regularly to review pipeline metrics and decide on early-stage, mid/late stage, and sales behavior actions to take.

Chapter 5

Shared Goals and Modern Metrics

Once you’ve aligned sales and marketing on accounts and revenue, you’ll need to measure if your approach is working.

A hangover from MQLs means teams are still looking at KPIs that aren’t aligned to revenue and sales productivity. Our recent research revealed only 43% of ABM practitioners are measuring ABM/target account opportunities.

But traditional metrics — clicks, form fills, page views, and downloads — don’t provide enough insight into account- or buyer-level influence. (They also leave the door open for marketing and sales to haggle over who deserves credit for a deal.) When we’re all working towards revenue, it doesn’t matter.

Rather than measuring which touch or action gets credit, we should measure the full set of interactions that contribute to deals.

Here are some of the switches you can make to measure the performance of your ABM strategy across the buying journey.

Engagement & Reach Metrics

Impressions → Reach

Shift from tracking impressions to measuring reach. Impressions might indicate visibility, but reach delves into the number of unique visitors within your target audience exposed to your campaigns, providing a more insightful metric for engagement.

Click-Through Rate → View-Through Rate

Move beyond click-through rates to view-through rates for a deeper understanding of how your ads influence actions. View-through rates, combined with tools like 6sense, unveil detailed insights into the impact of your advertising efforts on the buying journey of target accounts.

Cost Per Click → Cost Per Result

Replace the generic metric of cost per click with the more specific and strategic cost per result. By defining desired outcomes like keyword research, website visits, or demo bookings, you gain a clearer picture of the meaningful actions resulting from your marketing efforts.

Clicks → Number of Accounts Engaged

Instead of focusing on clicks, emphasize engagement. Measure how many accounts, not just individuals, initiate research or interact with your campaigns. Platforms like 6sense enable tracking account interactions, offering valuable insights into shifts in account behavior during the buying journey.

Lead Qualification & Conversion Metrics

MQLs → In-Market Accounts

Shift from Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs) to a focus on in-market accounts. Identifying accounts actively showing buying signals provides a more strategic approach, engaging multiple members of the buying team and increasing the likelihood of successful deals.

SQLs → 6QAs

Move beyond Sales-Qualified Leads (SQLs) to the 6sense Qualified Accounts (6QAs) metric. This empirical measure considers buyer activity, engagement of buying team members, and historical data, offering a more reliable signal for when an account is approaching a purchase decision.

Pipeline Attribution → Conversion of Accounts to Pipeline and Revenue

Instead of trying to attribute leads to specific channels, understand how campaigns influence accounts throughout their buying journey. This broader perspective helps you identify campaigns that effectively guide accounts toward revenue, avoiding the pitfalls of overly simplistic attribution.

Conversion Rate → Account Engagement Score

Replace basic conversion rates with Account Engagement Scores. Assessing account behavior on a nuanced scale from one to 100, based on various interactions, helps gauge an account’s readiness to buy and informs targeted content or outreach strategies.

Content Consumption, Buying Teams & Deal Acceleration Metrics

Page Views → Relevant Content Consumed

Shift from generic page views to tracking relevant content consumed. Understanding the depth of a buyer’s interaction with specific content provides more accurate insights into their readiness for a deeper conversation.

Contacts Reached → Buying Team Engagement

Move beyond basic contact information and focus on buying team engagement. Tools like 6sense help uncover buyer personas, enabling targeted content for each role within the buying team.

Number of Leads Processed → Account Velocity Through Buying Stages

Instead of counting leads, assess account velocity through buying stages. A faster progression indicates a smoother customer experience and efficient buying process, ultimately contributing to a healthier pipeline.

Get a full run down of modern B2B marketing metrics here.

Chapter 6

Building a Culture of Sales and Marketing Alignment

Beyond metrics, successful sales and marketing alignment depends on your culture.

Casey Carey, Chief Marketing Officer at Quantive, shared his experience navigating to an account-based revenue model on a recent episode of 6sense’s Revenue Makers podcast. One of his key takeaways was that the transition “was actually a change management problem, not a data or technology problem.”

Carey’s advice is a reminder that sales and marketing alignment is a way of working. One that prioritizes collaboration, over siloed team structures.

Yes, processes, measures, and tech can give you the foundation for a closer revenue team. But they’re enablers. It’s ultimately down to you to breed a culture of alignment in your organization. Here are some strategies to help.

Aligning Engagement: Defined Roles and Shared Language

To successfully create cultural change, sales and marketing need rules of engagement and a shared language.

At 6sense, for example, we use the buying journey to define each team’s roles, while also creating a shared language to avoid miscommunication. Before we look at how this aids alignment, here’s a brief runthrough of our buying stages:

Using intent data and artificial intelligence, our Revenue AI™ platform reveals the buying stages of accounts looking for solutions like ours.

When an account shows signs of intent, they move into the Awareness stage.
Once an account progresses to sit between the Consideration and Decision stages, they become a 6sense Qualified Account (6QA) — the sweet spot for sales to engage.

Alignment in Action

Whether you’re a 6sense user or not, the principles remain the same: Sales and marketing should know which team is responsible for what, and when, as you work to move prospects along the buyer journey.

Knowing a prospect’s buying stage (and having a shared language on these stages) makes it simpler to agree on this engagement. When data management company Talend scaled their account-based approach, this framework became the North Star that guided their team.

Today, Talend’s sales team focus their time on decision and purchase accounts — when accounts are in-market — and marketing are responsible for progressing accounts down the buying journey:

Marketing and BDRs engage early stage target accounts and progress them to in-market
Sales convert in-market target accounts to open pipeline
Teams combine to support the progression of open opps to closed-won revenue

As their Head of EMEA Marketing Rob Norman says, “The unifying effect it’s had on the way sales and marketing speak the same language is huge.”

Sustaining Alignment: Celebrate Wins and Ensure Regular Check-Ins

A key reason that teams fail with alignment is that it takes sustained work. One-off wins aren’t enough; you have to create a culture of shared victories and continuous improvement. Successfully doing this takes a commitment to communicating openly and checking-in regularly.

Here are some proven strategies to foster ongoing alignment:

Give marketing a seat at the table: Integrate marketing into key forums, like quarterly business reviews and account planning meetings to provide a platform for consistent collaboration.
Regular check-ins: Make sure both teams are moving in the same direction with regular catch-ups so you don’t discover large misalignments too late in a quarter.
Celebrate wins across teams: We don’t just mean your EOY blowout. Regularly highlight what the team has achieved together to sustain alignment. It’s a deliberate act that fosters a sense of unity and shared accomplishment. Every win is a chance to recognize how each team contributed.
Share learning opportunities: By celebrating successes, teams can analyze what worked well, understand why, and carry those insights forward.

Communicating openly and celebrating wins reinforces the idea that marketing and sales are part of the same team, working towards common objectives. This shared sense of purpose creates a positive cycle of alignment, motivation, and continuous improvement.

Chapter 7

Using Technology to Align Sales and Marketing

You can align your teams around accounts, metrics, engagement, and culture. But if your teams aren’t using the same systems, they’ll have their work cut out for them.

Say sales lives in your CRM, while marketing uses a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP). The teams are working from different data sets and targeting different goals.

Using siloed systems obstructs the flow of data and paints incomplete pictures of your prospects. This makes sharing insights and combining to engage customers across marketing and sales more difficult. In the end, you’re left with disjointed customer experiences.

The inflationary martech universe will always tempt businesses with shiny new pieces of technology that promise the world. But if you can’t integrate tools across your teams, they’re only contributing to misalignment.

To foster a truly collaborative revenue team, you need to run off the same core systems and data.

Using Common Systems in Sales and Marketing

When marketing and sales run from the same systems and a single source of data, the dream of a real-time, comprehensive view of the customer journey — from initial touchpoints to conversions — becomes a reality.

It’s simpler for teams to create and measure shared goals, speak a common language, and engage customers together.

On top of this, transparent data and mutual systems create accountability across your revenue team. A complete picture of the entire customer journey makes each team’s responsibilities clear, empowering them to proactively step-in when things aren’t going to plan.

Vitally, this visibility also shows what’s working to convert customers — almost always involving multiple touches across both teams. When marketing and sales can see that it really takes a combined effort to win, it creates a positive feedback loop. Suddenly alignment doesn’t look so difficult.

Bringing these elements together ultimately creates better buyer experiences, leading to an uptick in pipeline and revenue metrics.

Scaling Sales and Marketing Alignment with Smart Workflows

Once our data and workflows are integrated across departments, sales and marketing can spend time in the right areas and scale faster.

Here’s how a joined-up approach from sales and marketing can be orchestrated during the beginning of an example prospect journey, through to a first meeting:

Target

Marketing set up segment of best-fit ICP accounts
The always-on segment dynamically adds new accounts when they hit segment criteria
Dynamic display campaigns are automatically sent to the segment

Awareness

An account engages and is added to CRM, MAP, or sales engagement platform
Missing buying center data automatically acquired from third-party sources
BDRs are alerted to reach out using keywords and intent to tailor outreach
Buying group members are invited to a tailored webinar, or a roundtable based on keywords

Consideration / Decision

Sales reps are alerted when account shows increased engagement and comes in-market
BDRs and sales multi-thread key buying group personas
Direct marketing platform triggers gift to key personas

Decision

Account books a meeting with an AE

Using AI and big data to drive these types of workflows frees your people from mundane and repetitive tasks. Instead, they can use their expertise when and where it’s needed most, on high-value activities like creative marketing and customer meetings.

Chapter 8

Alignment Breeds Success

Sales and marketing alignment isn’t a short-term tactic, or a nice to have. It’s foundational to your success.

Winning B2B organizations prioritize a joined-up approach across the revenue team and all the way through the buying process. You can take practical steps to bring sales and marketing together by:

Going after mutually agreed accounts, not leads
Sharing goals and metrics
Committing to a culture of alignment and…
Using common technology

Follow these strategies and you’ll be on the way to unlocking the full potential of your revenue team.

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The Comprehensive Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment

Chapters

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Table of Contents

Introduction

Identifying the Root Cause of Misalignment

Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

No One Wins with MQLs

Strategies for Effective Sales and Marketing Alignment

Shift Focus From Leads to Targeted Accounts

Establish Revenue as the Ultimate Metric for Alignment Success

Shared Goals and Modern Metrics

Engagement & Reach Metrics

Lead Qualification & Conversion Metrics

Content Consumption, Buying Teams & Deal Acceleration Metrics

Building a Culture of Sales and Marketing Alignment

Aligning Engagement: Defined Roles and Shared Language

Alignment in Action

Sustaining Alignment: Celebrate Wins and Ensure Regular Check-Ins

Using Technology to Align Sales and Marketing

Using Common Systems in Sales and Marketing

Scaling Sales and Marketing Alignment with Smart Workflows

Alignment Breeds Success

The 6sense Team

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