Running a business without unified marketing and sales goals is like sailing without a compass: risky, directionless, and chaotic.
Marketing and sales leaders face the challenge of balancing different (and sometimes competing) priorities within the company, especially when key goals are not aligned. Inconsistency leads to confusion, wasted effort and missed opportunities to make a big impact. If your organizational structure is complex, this may further exacerbate the problem.
According to Amber Armstrong, regardless of your organizational structure, marketing and sales teams should always share the same priorities. This shared understanding not only keeps things running smoothly within the team; This is to enable the entire business to move forward cohesively and effectively.
Amber Armstrong is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Salesforce Sales Cloud. She is passionate about applied arts, science and marketing, and is committed to cross-business alignment. On the latest episode of GTM Innovators, Amber joins G2 consultant and former CRO Mike Weir to discuss strategies and tactics for making shared sales and marketing priorities a reality, as well as three key ways her team achieves effective alignment.
Achieve synchronization successfully
Let’s face it: sales and marketing have the same goals. They all want to grow their business and increase revenue. Still, for the most part, sales and marketing operate in separate silos that separate messaging, success metrics, analytics, and all other data points.
Amber shares how there is poor communication between sales and marketing in every organization she works for. She believes this is due to upfront inconsistency around goals and unclear responsibilities around achieving them.
“For organizations that are directly aligned with a set of products, adopting an account-based marketing (AMB) approach is a successful way to drive results and align with the sales team,” she said.
Sales and marketing teams can work together to optimize their resources. Marketers can extract data and insights, and salespeople can provide feedback based on customer interactions, enabling synchronized prioritization on which customers they want to focus on and how. This paints a clearer picture and allows the sales team to focus on getting support and coordination across the channel.
But when many sellers are operating at scale, marketing should drive influence and create focus among the sales team. “Marketing essentially needs to act as an inside sales team, ensuring that sales reps are product–whether they’re just product-focused or not–especially for multi-product vendors,” Amber said.
“Marketing should focus on making selling easier and reducing friction between sellers and customers. That’s the role of marketing, both in the early stages before an opportunity reaches the sales team, and after the sales team is already involved.”
Amber Armstrong
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce Sales Cloud
3 Key Strategies to Drive Alignment
Amber shares three key projects she leads at Salesforce to drive sales and marketing alignment. She emphasized the importance of thought leadership, leveraging organic traffic insights, and leveraging artificial intelligence technology to enhance team collaboration and enablement.
1. Build a thought leadership community
The Salesblazer thought leadership program includes extensive content samples and guidance. This is a necessary part of the Salesforce strategy because it aims to give back to the community, which includes people in various roles such as Salesforce administrators, developers, salespeople, salespeople, and sales leaders. The goal is to create useful content for this community and make it available as a helpful resource.
2. Drive organic web traffic
The second strategy involves generating organic traffic through an effective content strategy. This allows them to connect with the right audience and build their interest before a sales rep engages them. By monitoring website traffic and analytics, they can predict potential customer needs and interests, allowing sellers to know where to focus their efforts.
3. Generate AI capabilities and conversational insights
For the final strategy, Salesforce uses artificial intelligence for “Conversation Insights,” a tool that assesses and understands sellers’ conversations with customers. The service helps understand customer sentiment, competitor perceptions, and other challenges faced during interactions. Sales reps will also benefit by using artificial intelligence to summarize calls and automatically create tasks.
Artificial intelligence technology increases cohesion between sales and marketing, allowing both departments to better understand customers and support their needs.
Other things you learned from Amber in this episode
GTM Innovators with Amber Episode 14 also includes other highlights. Listen to the entire conversation to find out:
- How does the company position these strategies so that sales teams can see the value in them?
- What techniques does Amber use to implement these strategies effectively?
catch full episodes Please visit YouTube to learn more about Amber.subscription GTM Innovators Podcast Other insightful conversations with GTM experts – available to watch on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, and more.
