5 Biggest Challenges to Marketing and Sales Alignment in ABM

[jrineakter]

There’s a reason why talk of marketing and sales team alignment is all the rage right now. It’s the foundation for many important and emerging marketing and sales trends: the move from lead generation to demand generation , the shift to RevOps from siloed operations, selling to a committee versus an individual with account-based marketing (ABM), and the move to asynchronous selling.

While there are many benefits to this alignment, teams also face many obstacles when trying to get on the same page.

Read on to break down the top five challenges marketing and sales teams face when trying to align, as well as some solutions to make team alignment a reality.

01. Handover from marketing to sales
Handoff from marketing to sales seems pretty straightforward: when a lead is sales qualified (SQL), it’s the marketing team’s job to make sure their sales colleagues know about it.

What can go wrong? The answer is… a lot of things.

To generalize, there are two areas where this handoff can go wrong.

The first is qualification cambodia telegram data criteria, or the agreement on when the right time is to hand the contact over to sales. Think about it:

What are your marketing qualified leads (MQL) and SQL criteria?
What do you use to ensure that these criteria are met in daily handovers?
To what extent are qualifications nuanced?
If sales and marketing teams have different answers to these questions, the result can be handover nightmares.

The second problem has to do with the handover mechanism.

Do marketing leads automatically rotate once they are qualified, or do they already have an owner before they reach that stage?
Do you assign your sales rep a task, send them a notification, send them an email, notify them on Slack, or some combination of these options?
Tools like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and Sales Hub are great for facilitating this process, but the process only works to the extent that it’s defined. For the marketing-to-sales handoff to be successful, both teams need to think things through and come to an agreement—a task that’s much harder if the teams aren’t working on the same systems.

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The solution to marketing to sales handovers
To address a handoff from marketing to sales, set up a meeting between your marketing operations and sales operations teams to agree on the full parameters of the lifecycle stages.

Ask your teams what role deal stage, lead scoring , buying committee composition, and ICP level play in the timing and manner of the handoff.

Handoffs can change from team to team, ICP level to ICP level, and product to product.

Next, pull some reports to see at what lifecycle stage sales was involved in won opportunities to objectively determine what has been most successful to date.

Finally, once everyone is in agreement on the terms of the lifecycle stages and when and how sales should be involved, update your CRM, marketing automation platform , and other technology to accommodate these newly agreed-upon handoff guidelines.