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5 questions to diagnose why sales, marketing and CS are out of sync
If you’ve ever felt like your sales, marketing, and customer success efforts are out of sync, you’re not alone.
35% of respondents to our ongoing survey about the 15 GTM problems say their GTM teams lack alignment, clarity, and cohesion.
We’re doing a series on all 15 GTM problems. Bryan and Sangram identified and defined the 15 problems as part of their research for their bestselling book, MOVE: the 4 Question GTM Framework.
Here are two problems we’ve covered so far:
Sales, CS, and Marketing Are Out of Sync: Understanding the Problem
Here are some questions to ask to further understand and evaluate the problem:
1. Do you have a clearly-defined and data-driven Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and account list?
Yes, we have a clearly-defined and data-driven ICP and account list
Sort of - we have an ICP but we don’t have an account list
No, we’re not totally clear on who we should be marketing and selling to
Having an ambiguous ICP and no way to narrow down accounts will leave your teams unable to work together efficiently. “Go market”, “go sell,” and “go support” will likely lead to wasted resources across all teams.
Some companies go so far as to give higher-commissions on best-fit accounts, those that are likely to renew and expand, with lower commission on accounts that don’t fit the ICP.
The GTM leadership team will need to coordinate the teams and communicate daily to reduce GTM waste. It can help to have one C-level “owner” of GTM.
2. How would sales describe their relationship with marketing?
Marketing gets us what we need when we need it - we are true partners.
Marketing doesn’t understand our challenges - they try, but don’t always hit the mark.
Marketing is too wrapped up in their own projects and metrics and not at all tuned in to what we need to be successful.
Sales and marketing alignment can improve CAC, sales velocity, NRR, and a host of other metrics. It should be a top priority.
If sales and marketing are not getting along, dig deeper to find out why. Is it a problem with the personalities on those two teams?
3. How would customer success describe their relationship with sales?
Sales only sells to people who can be successful with our product, they turn away bad business.
Sales puts effort into ensuring the clients understand our key features, but can get confused.
Sales doesn’t care about anything but their numbers - they will say anything to get a deal, whether or not we can deliver on it.
Unmanaged selling outside the ICP often introduces issues and churn into a customer organization. Sales must listen to what the customer team is seeing (and what the data bears out) on bad-fit accounts to improve NRR and reduce churn.
4. How would marketing describe their relationship with sales?
Sales respects our timelines, our data and our strategic guidance - we are true partners.
Sales does their best, but they don’t always seem to rock the strategy and will color outside the lines.
Sales claims we don’t work or provide what they need, but they never use what we build for them.
When marketing feels disrespected, ignored, or underutilized, it’s a sure-fire way to increase CAC, decrease effectiveness, and slow demand gen.
5. Are GTM leaders of sales, marketing, and customer success all measured and incentivized on metrics related to overall company goals?
Yes. All leaders work toward a common goal (such as revenue), celebrate success collectively, and get bonuses accordingly.
All leaders work towards one common OKR but their bonuses are not tied to it.
No, each team has their own set of OKRs and only sales has pipeline goals.
There are four functional contributors to the GTM team as we see it, so it might make sense at your company for each to have a component of pipeline/revenue that they own.
An oversimplified version:
Sales owns outbound and partner-generated pipeline.
Marketing owns inbound, event, and community-generated pipeline.
Product owns PLG pipeline.
Customer Success owns renewals (and maybe part of upsells).
Join us for our next GTM Made Simple Roadshow
If you’re interested in learning more about the 15 problems, consider joining us for one of our GTM Made Simple Roadshows.
The attendees are all senior-level GTM leaders, which allows us to dig in, diagnose, and work on solving the problems together.
Here are upcoming dates, with 2024 cities announced but not scheduled yet:
November 3, 2023: Los Angeles (register here)
December 8, 2023: San Jose, CA
February 2024: Tampa, FL
March 2024: Austin, TX
April 2024: Atlanta, GA
Happy October, and as always, hope this newsletter is useful to you in your GTM efforts.
Love,
The GTM Partners Team
P.S. If you have GTM issues our analysts can help you diagnose and fix, book a strategy session here to dig into our approach.
