Recently I was advising a SaaS company and the topic of sales and marketing alignment came up. They’re post-Series A and ready to scale their sales and marketing teams. The SVP of Growth asked what sales and marketing alignment looks like in companies that do it well.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve worked with companies ranging from seed-stage startups to pre-IPO SaaS platforms pulling in $100 million ARR. Some could write the playbook on sales & marketing alignment, while others struggle to get processes and teams lined up.
Here’s how to get it right:
Have a clear view of the team’s north star metrics
The obvious answer is more leads and more revenue. The question is how many leads and how much revenue will motivate the team to hustle?
Attainable goals give teams positive momentum. Seeing progress towards growth can be a virtuous cycle. But when you’re VC-backed or in a competitive category, you need escape velocity. That’s when realistic goals aren’t aggressive enough.
Moonshot goals are a double-edged sword in motivating a team for aggressive growth. When a big swing turns into a big miss, you can have bad morale or attrition on your hands. That and a tough time explaining your misses to the board.
As you create your KPIs and goals, make sure you balance realistic goals with big shots that can move the needle for you in terms of growth. Here’s how to navigate that:
Strike a balance between realistic and stretch goals
High-growth, early-stage companies have a habit of setting unrealistic goals. VC-backing creates an urge to supercharge growth overnight. This leads to ambitious goals that end up being unrealistic. That gets a company in the cycle of constant goal revision.
Then two big challenges crop up:
The team doesn’t know what success looks like – and they don’t know how to line up their priorities with the company’s.
Team morale dips when they keep missing growth goals – and now you have an attrition problem.
Goals should be strategic, long-range, and grounded in data
Being thoughtful about key metrics reduces the risk of constant revision. The anatomy of a goal is:
Strategic: The goal ties to a broader company goal or vision.
Long-range: Something you plan to reach over a 6-12 month time horizon. I see you, startup founder, who thinks 3 months is the long view. ;)
Data-driven: Recent growth trends, hiring plans, market dynamics and planned investment are the right inputs. No gut instincts allowed.
Avoid the OKR ferris wheel trap
Companies can struggle with setting goals and sticking to them. Sometimes goal planning and execution don’t line up. This is what I call the OKR ferris wheel. That’s when a team is so busy setting OKRs it takes time away from hitting the actual metrics.
Here’s how this plays out:
Week 1: Individual team sets team and IC OKRs
Week 2: Team shares proposed OKRs with team leadership
Week 3: Team leadership meets with company leadership to review and align on set goals
Week 4: Individual team revises OKRs to line up with leadership feedback
Week 5: Company hosts all hands to review and align on each department’s OKRs
The team spends more than a month planning and discussing OKRs. If it’s a monthly OKR cycle, once one planning session wraps the next one starts. With quarterly OKRs, that gives the team a couple months to execute and track progress. That’s not enough data or traction to inform the next planning cycle.
All this planning takes time and attention away from actual growth. This makes it tough for leadership to:
Take a step back.
Think about what success looks like long term (6-12 months+).
Line up the team to hit goals.
Keep team goals front and center
Once goals are set, they should be front and center. The team needs to revisit progress regularly. Individual team and contributor goals should tie back to those metrics. If leadership doesn’t constantly refer to these goals, the team won’t know what success looks like.
Be thoughtful about process, operations, and org structure
Measuring progress towards goals is only as good as the data you capture and track. For early-stage companies, that means taking your pipeline out of spreadsheets and emails. Implementing a CRM should be top priority.
For later stage companies, a solid process looks like:
Consistent documentation of leads in the pipeline. (Ahem, lots of friendly reminders to sales to update Salesforce).
Proper database segmentation.
Letting teams have ownership of CRM data quality.
Have a dedicated team own revenue operations
Many successful teams hire for roles who own sales and marketing alignment. Sometimes that’s a sales operations lead who owns their CRM setup and data quality. In marketing, that’s often a marketing operations role. This person liaises with sales and owns the setup and flow of their marketing automation processes and software (Marketo, Hubspot, etc.).
Make revenue operations a leadership priority
One of my recent clients was a post-Series A B2B AI company with a VP of Global Revenue Operations. Most companies start with a sales or marketing operations manager. This was the first time I saw an early-stage company with a senior revenue operations hire.
This role partnered with the VP of Sales and myself as I served as the interim head of marketing. This org structure set the tone that sales and marketing alignment was a priority. Building this foundation so early in the company’s lifecycle was a smart move to scale growth.
I’d like to see more early-stage companies make this investment early on. By the time companies reach series C, pre-IPO or beyond, technical debt of a poorly designed growth operation can eat away at your team’s time and attention.
Sales and marketing leadership should meet (at least) weekly
Having clear goals and a bulletproof process are 80% of a successful growth org. The last 20% is transparency. Sales and marketing leadership should meet weekly to:
Track progress towards goals.
Discuss blockers getting in the way of closing deals.
Review strategic planning.
Smaller teams can have weekly standups of the broader sales and marketing org. Depending on company size, this can include customer success.
Once teams grow beyond a certain point, these meetings become less productive. Larger teams should have 5-10 Directors and/or VPs meet and report back to their respective teams.
Sales and marketing standups should have a clear agenda
One of the more successful growth orgs I worked with was a $100M ARR B2B HR software company that had a weekly standup for sales and marketing directors to review:
Inbound lead gen progress,
Upcoming marketing campaigns,
New and upcoming collateral sales can use for prospecting,
Strategic planning.
Org structure plays into sales and marketing alignment
This company set up their team to have:
Ownership of their CRM by a dedicated sales ops team.
Ownership of marketing automation by a 4-person marketing ops team.
Async collaboration via Slack and an internal sales and marketing wiki called Guru.
Both a CMO and CRO on the executive team for further alignment.
Have confidence in data that’s tracked
There’s transparency of communication and also transparency of data. This comes back to having a process for collecting and organizing data consistency. The team should have confidence in your CRM data quality. This requires ownership by your ops lead or a data partner.
Everyone should be looking at the same dashboards
Sales and marketing teams should have daily access to how they’re tracking towards goals. Leadership should review weekly, monthly and quarterly trends to understand what’s working vs. not.
When sales and marketing swim in the same direction, your company can scale growth. The sooner you can lay a solid foundation, the more your team can focus on growing vs. troubleshooting.
