How to Accelerate Your Growth by Aligning Sales and Marketing w/ Andrea Austin [Episode 374]

Joining me on this episode of Accelerate! is my guest Andrea Austin, Vice President of Enterprise Sales at InsideView, and the co-author of a brand new book called Aligned to Achieve: How to Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

 Andrea started at IBM as a marketing sales associate. Their ‘Selling Fridays’ taught her how to handle objections. Andrea joined InsideView three years ago, where she met her co-author, Tracy Eiler.

Andrea talks about handoff points between marketing and sales; MQL, SQL, and SAL; and conversion rates. In enterprise selling, some of the best leads in sales come from their own work. Andrea leverages Marketing for branding.

In SaaS, the buyer is now in charge. They do their due diligence before they engage with sales. Sales and Marketing need to align, to participate effectively in the customer experience.

Andrea says research pigeonholes the buyer’s thinking, as they seek the solution to one business pain point. Her goal is to influence the buyer’s perception of their whole problem.

Andrea explains how alignment can increase revenue by 10%, profitability by 15%, and growth rate by 19%, through clarity between areas; each doing that at which they excel.

InsideView researched where 1,000 respondents felt they were aligned, and not aligned: communication, processes, metrics, and data on target accounts. Aligned to Achieve attacks these in three ways: people, processes, and technology.

The book was written because misalignment between marketing and sales is too great.

Alignment requires a cultural change that needs the CEO to publicly support it. When sales and marketing push together, more happens.

To align sales & marketing efforts, Andrea organized a bi-weekly Smarketing meeting, which looks at results two weeks back, near events two weeks ahead, and plans two weeks beyond, making a six-week rolling window to align plans and feedback.

 Aligned to Achieve uses a looped symbol to represent the sales funnel on its head, continually cycling through the Find, Engage, Close, and Grow stages of the customer relationship.