Watching a well drilled NFL team drive down the field to the end zone, play after play inching closer to a touchdown, is probably one of the best ways to picture the importance of aligned teams.
Just imagine if there wasn’t perfect alignment…they’d be running into each other, fumbling, throwing interceptions and general chaos on the field.
Which is what many go-to-market teams look like in practice.
The left arm doesn’t know what the right arm is doing; different teams view each other with suspicion and try to lay the blame of their underperformance at the feet of their colleagues; messages to clients are mixed and confusing. The whole revenue team goes nowhere fast.
According to a Harvard Business Review article, the misalignment of sales and marketing (let alone other GTM teams such as SDRs and Account Manager), is estimated to cost businesses over $1 trillion a year!
And a Forrester Consulting report (commissioned by Linkedin) found that “9/10 sales and marketing professionals say they are misaligned across strategy, process, content and culture.” The impact? “98% & 97% of respondents (sellers and marketers respectively) think that bad alignment negatively impacts the business and the customer.”
Why do so many teams end up like this? And how do others get it right, executing play after well orchestrated play towards victory?
In this post I’ll outline the 5 key areas you need to focus on to be more like Superbowl winners.
These essentials of alignment are:
- Shared incentives
- Single source of truth
- Communication (inc. meetings)
- Empathy
- Operational playbooks & personas
Let’s take a look at each of them.
Shared incentives
This is the bedrock of getting your teams aligned.
NFL teams are hugely complex operations with multiple specialist skillsets and ambitious individuals blended together to pursue a singular goal – winning the game and ultimately the Superbowl. Getting a Superbowl ring on their finger is the shared incentive that drives the best teams to excellence.
Without that, they would fall apart.
For SaaS scaleups, that shared goal has to be Annual Recurring Revenue.
But not everyone can contribute equally to achieving this goal.
Just like in the NFL, once a quarterback has thrown the ball, he can’t influence whether or not the receiver catches it, takes it down the field or fumbles it; the Demand Gen team or SDRs can’t directly influence whether a deal closes. And Account Executives can’t directly control if an account is grown or churns due to their Account Management (while AMs equally can’t choose which accounts they inherit from the sales team).
So you can’t have a singular incentive and remuneration scheme that’s simply tied to ARR – incentives that sit outside your control are not motivating.
Which begs the question, how do you align incentives in a go-to-market team filled with specialist functions who have different levels of control over the ultimate goal of ARR?
The answer is twofold.
Firstly you need to know which outcomes for each team (leading indicators) tightly correlate with the overall goal of ARR (lag indicator).
Secondly you need to overlap each team’s goal to a reasonable degree.
What does this look like in practice?
It will differ for every team, but as a general rule of thumb, you can start by having the following goals:
- Demand Generation/B2B marketing team: MQLs, Inbound Opportunities, Closed/Won
- SDRs: SQLs, Outbound Opportunities, Closed/Won
- Account Executives: Closed/Won value of first year contract
- Account Managers: Gross and Net Revenue Retention
The key is to closely monitor your funnel conversion rates as your measures of success flow from one team to the next, because if you have one team killing their number (e.g. the marketing team smash their MQL number) and your ARR isn’t growing, then you know the correlation between the leading and lag indicators are out of whack and you have a problem that needs solving.
The great thing about this is that you can quickly identify the source of the issue and therefore a solution is likely to be found quicker.
More on how to dig into problems and optimise your GTM processes here.
Single Source of Truth
Next up, if you’re going to have overlapping incentives and review your GTM teams as a connected funnel, you need a single source of truth to record the performance of your teams.
I’ve heard many horror stories of the VP Sales and VP Marketing, both with their own ops teams and dashboards showing their stellar performance and ‘proving’ any misses could not be down to them.
You can’t be operating your SaaS scaleup in a ‘post truth’ world where nobody can agree on which data sets are correct.
To solve for this, you ideally need two things: a shared operations team that can act like Switzerland (typically revenue operations and reporting into a CRO who looks after sales, marketing and account management); and the output of their work which is a singular, shared set of reports and dashboards that all teams recognise as being the true picture of the world.
How you achieve this will depend on your tech stack and is too varied to dive into here. Just suffice to say it’s an outcome you need to achieve if you want aligned teams.
Communication
With shared incentives and a single source of truth, you’re moving step-by-step towards better alignment.
The next critical hurdle is fostering a culture of strong communication and managing the tools and systems that help to underpin it.
‘Communication’ is a frequently prescribed medicine for many organisational ills, but it’s usually a vague, hard to pin down concept when it comes to practical implementation.
Here’s what I believe minimum ‘good’ communication is required to build aligned GTM teams:
Meetings:
- Daily standup: 15 minutes at the start of the day for your team leads to sync on the 3Ps – Progress (from yesterday); Priorities (for today); Problem (any hurdles to the progress). This simple communication device can save days of delay.
- Weekly team meetings: 60-120 minutes for you to dive into the operational data that your team should run on, assessing key funnel metrics, team performance, focus areas etc. – not the time for a full-on strategy review.
- Quarterly retros & QBRs: Good chance for teams to share what’s working, what needs to be improved, and what else you should be doing (start/stop/continue) as well as looking at your position going into the next quarter.
- Annual KOs: Your chance to educate and inspire your whole GTM team on the task ahead for the year with a series of presentations, workshops and training sessions.
Asynchronous communication:
- Playbooks & Personas: (more on these below)
- Rules of Engagement: Often held in GDocs or Notion, these help everyone know simple things like which teams work which territories, what level of discounts are ok and in what circumstances or how you classify different account sizes.
- Dictionary/Taxonomy. Again usually housed in GDocs/Notion, every SaaS business has a plethora of jargon and acronyms…this is your place to ensure everyone understands what MQLs/SQLs/SAOs etc. mean (and any industry specific terminology too).
- Certification: Can be done via Google Forms, Kahoots or other sales enablement and onboarding technology. It’s a powerful communication tool to let new joiners know what’s really important to learn; and to share with everyone else they’ve taken the time to master it.
- Newsletter: Great way to round up major releases and news, celebrate wins, welcome new joiners etc.
- Video recordings (from Zoom/Hangouts or using something like Loom): Need to explain something in more depth or visually? Why not record a short video using Loom? Have a meeting where folks need to know the outcome and the thinking behind it…record it and post it out.
- About Me 1 pager: Really neat device to help individuals get to know each other’s preferred working styles and personalities…can help avoid awkward conversations that are down to differences in style versus substance.
In the moment communication:
- Instant messaging (e.g. Slack/Teams): Should be used sparingly as it can be as tone deaf as email and therefore ripe for misinterpretation; groups chats get noisey (so things missed); but 1:1 chats don’t scale, so you may lose context and leverage that would be helpful to others. Keeping this to a minimum is easier said than done.
- Talking IRL (e.g. Zoom/Hangouts…or even the office! Remember that?): Having a bond with teammates that runs beyond functional / transactional working relationships is a really powerful way of aligning folks.
With communication, don’t obsess over the tools…or overcomplicate them. The key is to achieve consistency with how they’re used and what is communicated through them. This way everyone knows where to go for the right information and they have clear expectations for how they’ll be informed about critical elements of your GTM execution without worrying about missing things.
If everyone can access the same information, in the same places and therefore get the same answers you have clarity across all your GTM functions. The alternative is ambiguity, and ambiguity leads to misalignment.
Empathy
Empathy comes from going beyond communication, to building shared experiences into the operating fabric of your go-to-market team.
This can be done in simple ways, such as having your SDRs join discovery calls with BDMs so they see first-hand how well qualified they are, and how likely they are to move further in the sales cycle. This is also a great way to train and develop your SDRs into future AEs.
Or have your Demand Generation team join SDR calls (and at the very least, listen to a handful each month). It’s amazing how powerful it can be having them listen directly to the market, hearing how prospects speak, what specific language they use, the objections they have etc.
This gives them the raw fuel to generate better content and materials aligned to how your buyers actually buy, while giving them a sharper view of how to distribute that content and attract prospects with greater authority and authenticity.
And of course, having AEs join a client QBR with the AM is a good way for them to learn what challenges AMs have with newly acquired clients or – ideally – the positive impact that a well sold solution is having for the client, which can tee up referrals and renewed confidence in the team to keep on selling.
Ultimately you want your teams to understand how each other works, the challenges they face, and how their own behaviours and actions can positively impact their teammates’ success.
At a previous scaleup, one of the most popular days we held each quarter was a prospecting day where we invited everyone – engineers, finance, legal as well as all commercial teams – to take part in doing some outbound prospecting by teaming up with the SDRs.
While there was a tangible benefit to this – more leads in the pipeline at the start of a quarter – the real power was in making the SDR team feel understood, underline the importance of their work, and have everyone else appreciate the challenges of the role.
Playbooks and Personas
How to operationalise these fully will be covered in the next post, but here’s a precis on their role in driving alignment.
Playbooks are the internal map that lets everyone know how they’re meant to get from A to B, and via the optimal route.
Personas are the destination, ensuring everyone is heading to the same place. They’re often a component of a playbook, but it’s worth calling them out separately as you could have multiple personas that share the same basic playbook…how that’s flexed and adjusted to the way different personas buy is then of critical importance.
Rules of engagement are a little like the highway code…they don’t tell where to go or how to get there, but they ensure everyone operates with the same regulations.
Conclusion
Team alignment isn’t an easy thing to achieve, but it doesn’t involve alchemy or luck either.
And once you have it, everything will feel so much easier for you and those working in your organisation.
Plus the business results will pay back dividends. Here’s one account of improving sales and marketing alignment from SuperOffice: “Within two years, it’s played a critical role in helping us increase new business revenue by 34%!”
This is why it’s worth the hard yards to put in place those shared incentives, a single source of truth, strong communication, empathy building exercises, and operationalised playbooks & personas.