How to build a sales and marketing alignment roadmap — Ryan Ruud // Lake One

Quotes

• “We’ll break the steps into four buckets. There’s agreement, accountability, actual alignment, and technology.” -Ryan “The agreement should take a look at those trailing indicators which are often the revenue targets but then have a discussion leading backward from that.” -Ryan“Get an agreement upfront. We often recommend documenting this and coming back to this often. We recommend having a Service Level Agreement between revenue teams.” -Ryan “Building an agreement is not just where the hand-off is, but what is the definition of each step in the funnel.” -Ben“Make sure there is a central source of truth of what a handoff looks like and what the expectation is for that handoff.” -Ryan “Accountability is less about what is the lead status going to be and more about who is actually going to be responsible and that gets exceedingly complex with large organizations.” -Ben “Alignment is a fail-safe double-check. You go back through the funnel checking if everything is lined up for a clean handoff. This is the final check off before you move into the technology phase.” -Ryan “There is an intermediary step before technology piece because so often people think they understand what the other team is doing and they think they understand how the technology is going to play until you actually walk them through it.” -Ryan “I think what this is, is the evaluation stage before you worry about the automation.” -Ben “The whole process of agreement, accountability, alignment, and technology piece is an iterative process.” -Ryan The goal of having this closed-loop view is not to say, ‘sales you’re failing or marketing, you’re failing’, it’s to embrace the idea that we are iterating through this together and to appreciate the accountability of both teams coming together and saying how we can achieve the goals of the business together. If you forget the punitive piece of this, that’s where you’ll get the fully integrated, aligned closed feedback loop.” -Ryan “Marketing and sales sometimes have adversarial relationships because if things aren’t going well, everyone starts pointing the fingers. But these iterative processes we’ve discussed helps everyone understand they’re in the same boat and where the funnel is breaking out so they can fix the problem.” -Ben