Fresh into the job, on my third day, the VP of Sales and I had an introductory call. As the newly appointed marketing communications manager at Sierra Wireless, the “me, myself, and I” team of one was, no lie, intimidated to speak with Jason Cohenour. It went well. He’s a seasoned pro and made me feel that I could achieve anything. The conversation ended with him saying, in his radio voice, if you don’t like it in marketing, come over; there is a place for you in sales. I look forward to working with you and Andrew Harries (VP of Marketing, co-founder of Sierra Wireless).
The rest they say is history, with many battle scars to prove it, (that’s another blog series itself – the life and times at Sierra Wireless, the dawn of the wireless data evolution @1997)
The conversation with Jason Cohenour, early in my career, firmly planted in my head how sales and marketing need to be brilliantly aligned. Fast forward 20 plus years, with the advance of martech automation, the opportunities to align marketing and sales and realize the benefits are nothing less than obvious.
Sounds easy? So far from it. Working with mid-sized enterprises, the conversations on how to align sales and marketing efforts may seem so apparent, but the implementation of the process is far less than easy. Why? Creating clear processes is no easy task, and even if they exist, they are often not clear. There is confusion on who’s doing what and if it meets each other’s expectations. Martech integrations, while they can be very powerful, are not optimized to include lead scoring or other automation considerations.
As we work on our Account-Based Marketing program at Magnolia, the conversation with Jason rings loud and clear today, more than ever. “To deliver the best possible MQL, and have the highest feats of productivity, sales and marketing have to be lock-stepped together to achieve a common goal.”
Here are 5 approaches to get team (re) alignment to overcome the frustration to convert strong MQLs (this makes marketing people giddy with pride) to qualified SQLs (this makes sales happy human beings 
).
Each team member fully participates with the acknowledgment that each plays a critical role to make a satisfying sales and marketing collaboration.
- Buy in. Get the teams (including product marketing, BD/sales, SDRs, marketing ops, marketing) aligned on the campaign
- Set clear goals of the campaign objectives; who’s doing what but also WHEN each party needs to step in
- Get a complete understanding of the customer journey; the touchpoints and how/when each team member steps in to support the journey
- Understanding how martech plays a critical role to automate the process; to make our lives easier, and NOT complicate things
- Accountability helps each team member take pride in ownership and execution of their respective tasks will make the campaign successful
So let’s get started to align sales and marketing, as the possibilities to create strong MQLs to convert to SQLs is highly achievable. Remember the goal to make marketing and sales teams happy people is always the highest priority.
By Phoebe Yong, Founder, President and Content Strategies at Magnolia Communications – a full-service B2B demand generation marketing agency headquartered in Vancouver, BC. We focus on engaging, nurturing and converting leads with PR programs, paid social ads, email marketing, and marketing technology implementation.