How to Get Sales and Marketing Operating as One Team with Heidi Melin, CMO of Workfront




B2B Lead Roundtable show

Summary: Marketing and sales alignment working together as one team is really about the customer.<br> Why? Because today, buyers are in control.<br> For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales.<br> That’s why I interviewed Heidi Melin (<a href="https://twitter.com/heidimelin">@heidimelin</a>), CMO at <a href="https://www.workfront.com/">Workfront</a> on how to get sales and marketing operating as one revenue team.<br> Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?<br> Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO.<br> I’ve been in marketing for my entire career, having started really on the advertising side, but mostly focused on fast-growing software businesses.<br> So, I have recently in the last year joined Workfront and I am the CMO at Workfront.<br> <br> How can sales and marketing operate as one team<br> Well, throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share at working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well.<br> Also, so all those lessons learned include things like ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team.<br> And indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace on a longer-term view. But the immediate term goals must be aligned.<br> So being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams are critical.<br> We talk about it inside Workfront as one view of the truth because so many times we’ve all probably sat in meetings with sales and marketing executives and you spend most of the meeting arguing about whether or not the number is right instead of diagnosing what we need to work on to improve.<br> So, ensuring that you’re working on a common set of numbers is hard.<br> It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard.<br> And so that’s one of the things that I think is the key to success–ensuring that measurement and all the programmatic, as well as the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing, is aligned because it’s one business process.<br> One business process focused on revenue<br> The way that I think about it is marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff.<br> But the way that I think about it is that it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business.<br> [click_to_tweet tweet=”The way that I think about it is that it’s one business process focused on the revenue of your business” @heidimelin #marketing #sales” quote=”The way that I think about it is that it’s one business process focused on the revenue of your business.” – Heidi Melin]<br> It starts from the time that a marketing team targets a specific customer or prospect, and they raise their hand and ask for more information or engage all the way through to close business. So, it’s one business process, not two separate business processes.<br> And, oh, by the way, it’s aligned to something way more important than a sales team or a marketing team: it’s aligned to how a buyer buys your product.<br> And we forget that sometimes, we’re like, “Oh, well the marketing process does this…”<br> I’m like, oh no, no, no.<br> We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process.<br> Flip your focus on the customer<br> Heidi: Yeah, and so when you flip that, and you look at the focus on the customer, all of sudden marketing and sales from an outreach, from an engagement perspective, has one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process.<br> And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important.<br>