How to create a marriage made in heaven to give your customers a first-class, personalised experience
Erik Syrén“The best way to bring sales and marketing together is to measure common metrics, not marketing leads and sales leads.”
The B2B buying process has changed. Customers are more informed than ever, heavily researching businesses online, and coming to them slap-dab in the middle of the journey. This means marketing and sales teams need to inspire and educate customers on these ‘self-led’ buying journeys from day one.
And since customers expect the smoothest of experiences – alignment is critical, especially for B2B SaaS companies.
Customers often trial software online, coming to sales late in the buying process (if they come to them at all). Once they’ve subscribed to your product, it’s easy for them to simply quit if they don’t get onboarded smoothly – goodbye investment on acquisition.
To win, sales and marketing need to go hand-in-hand, integrating inbound and outbound activities.
So, why should you read this eBook? Because sales and marketing alignment actually matters. It allows you to nail the customer buying journey, focus your efforts around unified messaging, and therefore approach the right type of customers.
The result? All the good stuff: increased revenues, happier customers, and deals that close more quickly. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
This is a valuable 12-minute read but if you only have two minutes, click here to jump to the key takeaways.
Let’s meet the brains behind this eBook’s insights:
— Managing Director, Operations Lead, Monterro
Erik is a veteran of the SaaS world, with over 20 years’ experience in the software industry as a CEO, entrepreneur and investor. His previous positions include CEO of Lime Technologies, and board member of Formpipe and Wiraya. At Monterro, Erik is focused on providing operational support to our portfolio companies, as well as having several positions on the board.
— Chief Commercial Officer, Kognity
Helen has extensive leadership experience in both the SaaS and consulting worlds. She has previously been working as COO of software company DPOrganizer and as a manager at Nortal – a multinational tech company. She also worked as CEO of Element Lead Management, and has experience of helping both startups and established companies improve customer experience, and increase revenue. She’s a B2B sales (and complex SaaS sales) expert.
— Chief Marketing Officer, Monterro
Charlotte has worked in B2B marketing throughout her career, focusing on SaaS businesses for the last decade. She has set up inbound and outbound marketing and sales development teams, and is passionate about customer journeys and improving customer experience. She recently joined Monterro, having previously been Senior Manager of Corporate Marketing at Salesforce in Sweden.
— Investor, Author and co-founder of Megadeals
Coined the ‘father of Account Based Marketing’, Christopher has decades of experience getting sales and marketing teams working together. His book Megadeals has cemented his reputation as an ABM leader, while his business, Megadeals Advisory assists B2B scaleups and Fortune 500 companies in doing just that – making mega deals.
Alignment between these two teams is a big deal if you want to nail your customers’ problems, offer them the right solution – and get them to stay.
SaaS companies often say their USP is providing a ‘user-friendly’ experience for complex software, but this doesn’t happen without sales and marketing making the whole process feel seamless.
If you make customer journeys more efficient and coherent, the customer has a better time with your product.
Here’s how to work together to create a customer experience that exceeds expectations.
If the customer buying journey starts with a prospect looking for an answer to their problem, marketing should create content to solve it.
But this is a crucial stage of the process for sales too. As a customer matures, teams can see what content the customer has been consuming, what they’re interested in or need help with, and can adapt their approach accordingly. In turn, the customer gets a personalised experience that’s smooth as silk – as long as no one is working in silos.
Christopher Engman“If marketing tries to solve content all by themselves it won’t work, because often they simply don’t have the intel needed to land the idea.”
When it comes to creating content, marketing’s best contributors are their sales representatives. Sales teams don’t use 65% of marketing content because it doesn’t meet their needs or impact deals. And yet, they’re the team who get closest to your customers and talk to them regularly about their challenges.
Sometimes it’s not how you say it, it’s what you say. Sales and marketing are going to communicate with customers differently about products, but it’s vital they have a shared language when doing so.
To create this, set up meetings to go through your messaging architecture together and ensure you have tight coordination over key aspects of it e.g. common customer objections. Then adapt the messages to your key verticals, so it’s super relevant to your target audience.
Pro tip: Your CRM should be at the centre of your strategy
Helen Agering“It’s important to get your CRM (and wider systems) right. A tech-minded commercial administrator is a must. They’ll lead on the configuration and daily administration of your CRM, and make strategic decisions on how best to use it and ensure access to relevant data throughout the customer journey. Automate time-consuming tasks so your teams can focus on high-level customer activities instead. Your CRM is much more valuable if you get actionable insights on what works and what doesn’t on a daily basis – and adjust accordingly.”
You can’t manage what you can’t measure – so getting shared metrics between sales and marketing is vital to judge success. But what should you be taking stock of? Here are some measurable must-haves.
Erik Syrén“The most common mistake people make is not defining what a lead is between sales and marketing. So, define the target market and the audience. If you’re a software company, be very specific.”
To reach your most wanted customers and grow your business, you need both inbound and outbound strategies.
If you rely solely on inbound marketing, you risk losing those potential customers that need an extra push to find you, or who just haven’t seen your content yet. A close knit sales and marketing team can work together to proactively engage customers, especially when you want to raise awareness and interest in a specific vertical. But don’t forget another critical component to success: sales development.
Charlotte Banning“Sales developers sit between marketing and sales, so they’re perfectly positioned to qualify inbound leads and proactively reach out to potential customers you’ve identified.”
This means they’re perfectly positioned to qualify inbound leads and take care of proactive outreach to the potential customers you’ve identified. This makes them key to the success of your activities. So, how can you help them nail their job? That’s right, align them with sales and marketing, and get specific on who they should target.
By closely collaborating with sales, they can help them effectively prospect for new leads. They should also work with marketing to input on any activities.
So, should a sales developer be in the sales or marketing team? It depends on the business, the size of your deals, and the amount of (and type of) leads your teams handle.
But it’s more important that they successfully cultivate relationships with prospects and decision-makers they can then hand over to sales. They can only do this well if everybody’s on the same page, not just in the same team.
Sales and marketing can be the perfect pairing. But what happens when it all goes south? Here’s how to avoid the common mistakes that threaten a harmonious partnership.
Working together on a broad audience doesn’t create big wins. So instead, focus collectively on specific verticals and geographical markets. Otherwise you’ll be spread too thin and the value of your products won’t come across – it’s marketing money down the drain.
A customer success team can be a serious advantage, as long as it doesn’t create a new silo. Every time you handover customer information, it’s easy for things to get lost and to blame each other. So it’s essential this team is really close to sales and marketing. They should share the same KPIs and map out the customer journey together so nothing falls between the cracks.
Reduce friction by making sure leads created by marketing aren’t lost or left cold. It helps to look at the pipeline together and get in sync to spot opportunities, and continuously adjust your tactics. Otherwise your marketing team will continue to generate low-quality leads.
If you work in silos, you risk having a high cost of acquiring a customer (CAC), which can cause problems. E.g. If you have a high-touch business, involving a series of personalised comms with your customers, you need to make sure you don’t have too high a CAC.
Pro tip: Ditch the regular sales meetings – try land and expand
Christopher Engman“You need to run meetings where marketing and sales go through everything together. We divide accounts into nine ‘buckets’ in order of priority, and existing vs potential customers, then discuss each bucket and the individual accounts within them. Sales and marketing leadership teams address high level strategy. Account managers take charge of individual sessions. Alignment is very rarely an organisational issue. You need to make sure your teams are on the same page.”
Helen Agering“Fighting over who created the lead wastes valuable time. Just closed a deal? Credit everyone involved, especially if you’re in sales and want more support from marketing. Sure, the sales rep closes the deal, but if you want to improve sales and marketing alignment, create a culture of acknowledgement and shared wins. Your customers want to feel like they’re dealing with one team, so it needs to feel like that within your organisation too.”
You might already be convinced that aligning sales and marketing is worth it, but how do you get them together for good? Here are some tips for a fruitful union.
What customers and verticals are you specifically going after? Decide together. It’s important that the marketing and sales teams work closely on this to establish common messaging and unified goals. The next step? Teams specify brands they’d like to have as customers and work together on targets using account-based tactics.
Decide who does what and when between marketing and sales – include key processes, such as: how to hand over leads, what to log in your CRM, and how to handle unqualified leads. This way, you’ll be working as one team and nothing will fall through the cracks.
Take a formalised approach to collecting customer data, but instead of just funnelling it into a dark corner of a CRM, sit down and look at the accounts and patterns together. Make it part of your catch-ups between teams and create new goals off the back of it.
It’s easy to be focused on the short-term when teams are looking for new leads, but it’s worth getting sales to buy into long-term marketing activities such as brand positioning. It’s also just as important that your customers are happy and use your product as they’re your best ambassadors, supporting sales. Marketing needs to provide support during the customer success journey to ensure they use the product and ultimately buy more. Get this process aligned and you’ll see the teams working better together.
A lot of friction happens because people across teams don’t have much insight into what other people actually do. You can get round this by integrating some of their activities. Marketing can shadow sales at events and meet customers, while sales can drop into content workshops. It helps them to buy into what the other team does and allows them to understand how they can help each other. It’s also worth onboarding new people by both teams so they feel part of one unit.
Pro tip: Lead by example
Charlotte Banning“One of the most important things that sales and marketing can do to stay aligned is to embody best practices. When senior leaders make the effort to stay aligned, it has a knock-on effect throughout the organisation. It shows that collaboration is not only encouraged, but expected, and creates a culture in which your teams can flourish – together.”
Erik Syrén“This is what we try to change when we work on sales and marketing with our SaaS companies – less gut feeling and more data.”
And that’s it.
Don’t slave away in silos. Have joint team meetings and go through account activity together.
Set your positioning, your markets, your verticals, your target audiences and your ideal customer profiles.
Get on the same page with messaging for a smooth customer journey for each vertical, and create a shared language when talking to customers.
Both teams should judge success by the same measurements, where customer satisfaction and ARR are the most important. The best way to get to know your customers and plan ahead is with data. Collect it. Analyse it. Learn from it – together.
We’re Monterro, an investment firm (of the get-your-hands-dirty with strategy and operational support variety) that helps Nordic software companies hit their biggest growth goals.
