Are Your Sales & Marketing Syncing—or Sinking?

The cost of Mis-Alignment between Sales & Marketing

Often, sales and marketing teams are out of sync. They see themselves as separate functions within the overall organization, and may be siloed within separate departments under different management. In this scenario, marketing initiatives can falter, leading to missed opportunities and decreased revenue.

How Account Based Marketing aligns your Sales & Marketing teams

When marketing and sales teams are completely aligned on select company targets, they can work closely together to create a holistic approach to both find new prospects and remarket to existing customers. The resulting hyper-personalized experience encourages upselling and cross-selling to drive long-term value from your contact list. 

In fact, 91% of companies using ABM increase their average deal size (SiriusDecisions).

The Benefits of Aligning your Sales and Marketing teams 

Effective Targeting: Aligned targeting efforts help you focus resources on accounts that offer the most potential.

Improved Lead Quality: When marketing is generating leads that align with the sales team's criteria, it can lead to an increase in conversion rates.

Efficient Response Times: Clear and effective communication between sales and marketing can result in faster responses to leads, potentially increasing valuable opportunities.

Consistent Messaging: Clear and consistent messaging educates and persuades prospects and builds strong brand reputation.

Use these 5 Steps to Align Your Teams 

1. Define Shared Goals: These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
2. Establish a Joint Operating Plan: Create a document outlining the roles, responsibilities, and processes for both teams.  
3. Utilize Shared Tools and Data: Implement tools that allow both teams to access and analyze the same data.
4. Foster Open Communication: Encourage regular communication between sales and marketing teams, creating a culture of transparency and collaboration.
5. Implement a Feedback Loop: Establish a system for feedback and continuous improvement.  
6. Drive Lead Capture: Develop gated lead magnets that offer value that exceeds the value found in your free content. Solve customer problems, build trust, and make sure lead generation content covers bottom-of-funnel topics to lift purchase intent and improve conversion rates.

Aligning your sales and marketing teams is essential for driving the best results from your ABM initiatives. By following the tactics outlined above, organizations can create a more cohesive and effective approach to ABM.

Case Studies of Successful ABM Marketing

Here’s some real world examples of companies that used ABM principles to hit it home.
 

1. Snowflake Doubles Enterprise Meetings With Sales-Marketing Alignment

Founded in 2012, Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform that stores, processes, and analyzes big data for thousands of companies. When they went public in 2020, their sales team came under closer scrutiny and pressure to deliver. While they had a small team working on account-based marketing initiatives, they overhauled the program to systematize and expand ABM.

Snowflake’s first step was to identify which target accounts to sell to, and although outwardly visible clues (like industry and company size) were important, their ABM team worked with sales and big-name partners to gain conversation-level insights.
Snowflake’s primary channels for account-based marketing include LinkedIn, targeted marketing web pages, and direct emails to stakeholders. They also used events in the field to engage top accounts. With behavior tracking technology, they could monitor when accounts were engaging with ABM materials and follow up by having SDRs reach out.

The Result

The combination of digital technology and real human contact resulted in a 75% jump in SDR-booked meetings. Their Enterprise meeting rate more than doubled. Cross-team alignment and marketing automated  technology helped Snowflake bring 1:1 marketing to more than 2,000 accounts.

BBG&G’s Hot Take

This example shows how a cross-functional endeavour between sales and marketing teams and the right media and marketing technology can combine their strengths to effectively target top prospects.
 

2. Dialpad Leverages Personalized Content to Move Up Market 

Dialpad is a customer intelligence and engagement platform designed to connect colleagues with both each other and customers. Sales teams can have phone or video calls with customers and keep up-to-date account records. AI  automatically transcribes meetings, evaluates the tone and outcome of conversations, and provides suggestions for improvement.

In recent years, Dialpad has been expanding their product suite with differentiated offerings for sales, customer service, and internal communications. They needed to introduce new products to customers, but they also wanted to close more enterprise accounts. Recognizing that larger companies often come with a longer sales process, Dialpad turned to ABM.

Choosing to target by persona rather than by industry to improve efficacy, Dialpad created ads that spoke to each persona’s individual pain points. They ended up with more than 50 sets of personalized ads to drive target accounts to new feature pages. They used automated marketing platforms to track which contacts from which companies were engaging with the ABM content and deployed sales reps to continue the conversation.

The Result

Their top-of-funnel focus and ABM strategy paid off. Dialpad was getting 10x the target account site visits that they were before and more than tripled their closed-won revenue. And, with ABM, Dialpad was closing deals 52% faster.

BBG&G’s Hot Take

The ability to narrow in on specific personas and solve their unique challenges is a key ingredient of account-based marketing success. By creating content tailored to your target personas, your marketing can also stand out in a sea of digital advertising.

More about Deborah

Deborah Garry, founder and CEO of BBG&G Integrated Marketing, leads a full-service award-winning marketing communications team that develops successful and effective integrated branding and marketing programs. BBG&G provides branding, web, digital, social, creative design, influencer, video, emarketing, and content marketing for a broad range of B2B and B2C industries across national and international markets. 27 years after founding BBG&G, Deborah, a Certified Account Planner and Marketing Automation Specialist, remains passionate about reimagining solutions that position agency clients as industry leaders and help them achieve business growth, expansion and success. BBG&G’s proven process helps their clients overcome challenges, attract and retain customers, and accelerate growth through the power of storytelling. Deborah and her team successfully strive to provide an unparalleled customer experience. They often become their clients' "go-to" resource for marketing innovation and best practices, assessing and integrating emerging technologies into their marketing programs. As well as serving on various boards and committees, Deborah is a past recipient of the Hudson Valley Women in Business award and The Enterprising Women of the Year award. In 2024 she was recognized as an honoree by the 100 Women to Know in America.