When strategies begin to become misaligned with your sales team how do you ensure you both get back on track? What measures do you put in place to stay on track with aligned strategies?

To make sure strategies align, you have to ensure that sales and marketing are reading from the same sheet of music. When a marketing team is measured on leads, not opportunities (pipeline/revenue), marketers will determine what tactics produce the most leads and execute on those. Immediately, you have a misalignment of both objectives and tactics. To avoid all of this, measure sales and marketing on the same thing. With both teams looking at opportunities, the tactics to generate pipeline will be front and center. 

I believe the simplest solution to misalignment is to make sure that both the sales and marketing teams' OKRs align with the same company objectives and to make sure that front-line managers in both organizations have regular touchpoints to communicate what campaigns and programs are running and how effective they are a generating leads. My team has weekly calls with our EDR teams to give and receive feedback on lead quality and campaign performance, as well as a monthly campaign enablement session to ensure sales understands what programs are in market generating demand.

When strategies begin to become misaligned with your sales team, it is important to evaluate the situation from an objective perspective. Assess the scenario, similar to the idea of a retrospective, and map out possible solutions.

To get back on track and stay on track, I recommend the following:

• Focus on communication. How can you proactively address questions or concerns before they arise? What does this look like? Do you need to have a regular standup meeting to check in? Do you need to provide write-ups to inform better alignment?
• Process improvement. In partnership with the sales team, identify where you got off track and solutions to avoid it in the future. This conversation should not be personal, but rather about the process itself.
• Set goals. Again, in partnership with sales, define what success looks like (e.g., pipeline). Be sure to communicate that you are there to support their success as well.
• Continue training, assessing and improving. This is an ongoing process. Together define what is working, what isn’t working and what needs to be improved. This should be a collaborative effort. Together, regularly assess individual and team performance to identify areas for improvement and develop action plans to address them.

A partnership with sales is critical and it is worth the effort.