1. Strengthen organizational alignment
Drive shared objectives across challenging team structures
Few marketing or sales leaders would admit to misalignment at the top. CMOs and CROs or heads of sales typically align on strategic priorities for the business. Jennifer Jackson, CMO at Actian, says, “I make it my mission to be aligned to what the business is doing and what the business cares about.” The major challenge is cascading that alignment through differently organized teams.
B2B enterprise sales teams are usually segmented by region, industry, and account-level prioritization, such as key accounts, enterprise, and commercial. Marketing is typically function-based, including brand, demand, operations, and field.
While field and regional marketing teams often align neatly with sales, most marketing groups do not. “Aligning marketing to the way the sales team is structured sounds obvious but some organizations don’t do that,” says Virtusa CMO Brian Jochum. Organizational alignment thus relies heavily on three areas: objectives, planning, and metrics.
“The biggest challenge many organizations have is aligning marketing and sales objectives and metrics,” says Marlowe Fenne, Director of ABX at Pulumi. Marketing focuses both on long-term objectives, such as brand development, and near-term initiatives for engagement, leads, and loyalty. Sales focuses primarily on winning deals and booking revenue. The goals are complementary but lead to differing priorities in daily practice.
Agreeing on a “Three R’s” approach—Reputation, Relationships, and Revenue—helps create shared business objectives that drive both near- and long-term growth. Marketing commits to tangible revenue goals, not just engagement and leads, while sales commits to positioning and relationship measures that pave the way for future revenue.
Shared objectives can support more collaborative planning across marketing and sales. Account-based marketing (ABM) is often a crucial step.
Mapping out shared priorities and initiatives at the account level helps model broader integration while building trust in the field.
At Infosys, for example, marketing works with sales on every opportunity with their most important accounts, from planning to execution. Amit Deshpande, Associate Vice President, Marketing at Infosys says, “We work on the plan together with the account team, ideally with a three-year horizon, and then figure out together how marketing can best serve their objectives.”
At a higher level, Actian has developed an integrated go-to-market planning process with sales and marketing leadership focused on top business objectives. Jennifer Jackson explains, “We have an in-depth planning process each year where we assess, product by product, what the business needs to achieve and then build our plans to support that.”
Establishing shared metrics helps close the loop on aligned objectives and integrated planning. Revenue measures often come first; marketing commits to pipeline goals in areas such as customer acquisition, retention, and revenue growth. Complementary measures can then support a more holistic, strategic approach toward the three R’s. These could include metrics such as brand preference, executive-level relationships, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS)—all of which support sustainable growth.
Getting past the attribution battles is key. “Attribution can be a zero-sum way of thinking. If I'm getting credit, you’re not,” says Virtusa’s Brian Jochum. “I try to reframe that conversation completely by never claiming to be the sole party responsible for success. Instead, we focus on correlations and not causation.” Marlowe Fenne adds, “It’s amazing what can happen when nobody cares who gets the credit.”
