Sales and marketing misalignment can lead to a domino effect of problems such as internal tension, inability to achieve goals, and even revenue loss. Yikes.

But in order to grow and move forward, it’s crucial to assess and understand where you’re at currently with your smarketing efforts. So, how do you evaluate sales and marketing alignment? How do you know if your sales and marketing efforts are successful?

Here are 8 must-ask questions to understanding your company’s B2B smarketing state of the state.

Alignment Evaluation Question #1: Are Teams Speaking the Same Language?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the first areas for assessment is verbiage and definitions. Communication is key but can be extremely difficult if teams aren’t speaking the same language or starting from some place of commonality.

Questions to ask:

• Do your teams have a common definition and understanding for the following terms?
  • Marketing Qualified Lead
  • Sales Qualified Lead
  • Disqualified Leads
  • Lead Status
  • Contact Lifecycle Stages
  • Deal Stages
  • Traffic Sources (direct, referral, search, etc..)

The above is by no means an exhaustive list of all of the sales and marketing alignment terms, but it’s a start. At a minimum, it should get you analyzing the common ground (or lack thereof) between the two teams when it comes to defining the sales and marketing process.

Alignment Evaluation Question #2: Are Teams Targeting the Same Buyers?

We have stressed time and time again the importance of buyer personas. Buyer personas (in conjunction with research) should drive your strategy and be another common denominator among your sales and marketing teams and really, the company as a whole. When evaluating your sales and marketing alignment, persona definition is critical.

Questions to ask:

• Are buyer personas defined?
• Did both teams have influence in their creation?
• Are the personas still relevant or do they need to be updated?

Interested in some mind-blowing sales and marketing alignment stats? Check out this post.

Alignment Evaluation Question #3: Are Teams Working Towards the Same Goals?

Sales and marketing can be impactful independently, but joined together and working towards the same goal? Teams will achieve much more.

Nothing sets you on the fast-track to success like SMART goals.

Questions to ask:

• Do the teams separately have SMART goals?
• Are the goals well-known among the two teams and agreed upon?
• Are the goals measured and tracked?

In need of a SMART goal refresh? Then this worksheet is for you.

Alignment Evaluation Question #4: Are Teams Promoting the Same Products/Services?

Not all products and services are created equal. Through defining your buyer personas or crafting your smart goals, you likely surfaced key areas of focus whether it be new product offerings, key industries, revenue generation, etc.

For example, if demos have been unsuccessful but consults are effective, marketing likely shouldn’t be pushing demos as their bottom of the funnel offer in the nurture sequences.

Questions to ask:

• Is sales aware of the products/services that marketing is promoting and vice versa?
• Are both teams in agreement on the best direction?

Alignment Evaluation Question #5: Are Teams Creating Content Together?

Although content creation doesn’t necessarily fall under the job descriptions of the sales team, sales should have an influence in content topic selection. Why? Because they are the front lines and literally the voice of the customer inside the company. Pairing sales’ insight with marketing’s keyword research skills is a great start to creating valuable content for your buyers.

Insider tip: We like to take it one step further and create what we call a content audit. It’s a living document that houses links to all of the content created and breaks it down by buyer persona and stage of the buyer’s journey. There’s also a tab for content requests that’s a direct line into marketing’s content topic queue. Here are some additional smarketing best practices to help.

Questions to ask:

• What processes currently drive content topic selection?
• Does sales approve?
• Is there a way for sales to communicate content requests to marketing?
• Does marketing have an audit document or something like it?

Alignment Evaluation Question #6: What is Marketing’s Lead Handoff Procedure?

Marketing curates leads through inbound or paid media and then at some agreed upon point, the leads need to be passed to sales to be contacted and qualified. There are a few ways to accomplish the handoff. Our favorite is using marketing automation software (like HubSpot) to do the heavy lifting. However, software aside, a step in evaluating your aligned sales and marketing alignment should be your ability to answer the questions below.

Questions to ask:

• At what point in the process does marketing handoff a lead to sales? What triggers it?
• How is sales notified of the lead?
• What is the follow-up expectation from sales? (i.e. how many days do they have before they make contact, how are they contacting the lead, etc.)

Alignment Evaluation Question #7: How Does Sales Provide Feedback on Lead Quality?

In order for marketing to continue to deliver the sales team quality leads, there needs to be a feedback loop. Sales needs to communicate through lead status- the quality of the lead. This ties back all the way up to the first question about definitions.

Questions to ask:

• How does sales communicate a rejected lead? (marketing automation software or otherwise?)
• Does sales have a way to communicate why leads were rejected? (Poor timing, bad contact information, no budget, etc.)
• What does marketing do with the rejected leads? Where are the leads at now?

Pro Tip: Formalize this process and set clear expectations and goals around lead quality, feedback, and lead volume by building a sales and marketing Service Level Agreement. Read about SLAs here.

Alignment Evaluation Question #8: Do Teams Have Regular Meetings?

Actually meeting in person, having conversations, and building rapport are critical to sales and marketing alignment success. It’s so much easier to work as a team when you have a strong foundation to work from.

So how do you build rapport? Meetings. But let’s be clear, quality of meetings should be prioritized over quantity. Nothing disengages teams like pointless meetings.

Questions to ask:

• Do teams have monthly and/or quarterly meetings?
• Do teams have a way to easily communicate outside of meetings? (Like Slack or Skype)

The trick to these meetings are to make them engaging, yet structured. Here’s an article with some great tips for doing just that.

Evaluating Sales and Marketing Alignment Key Takeaway: Communication is a Must

Do the questions above have your head spinning or wondering where to even start to begin to achieving sales and marketing harmony?

Start with communication. If there is one commonality that leads to the improvement of sales and marketing alignment, it’s communication. It fuels defining the terminology, the buyer personas, content creation, and the entire smarketing process. Whether facilitated through technology or happening in regular scheduled meetings, it’s critical.

Need a little help with your sales and marketing alignment? You’re in luck because that’s our specialty. Contact us here.