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

Working together as one team in marketing and sales alignment is about the customer. Why? Because today, buyers are in control. For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales. I interviewed Heidi Melin (@heidimelin), CMO at Workfront, on how to get sales and marketing to operate as one revenue team. Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO. I’ve been in marketing my entire career, having started on the advertising side but primarily focused on fast-growing software businesses. So, I recently joined Workfront and am the CMO at Workfront. How can sales and marketing operate as one team? Well, throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share of working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well. Also, all those lessons learned include ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team. Indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace in the long term. But the immediate-term goals must be aligned. So, being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams is critical. 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. So, ensuring you’re working on a standard set of numbers is hard. It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard. One key to success, I think, is ensuring that measurement, all programmatic activities, and the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing are aligned because it’s one business process. One business process focused on revenue. I think that marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff. But I think about it because it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business. It starts when 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. 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. And we forget that sometimes, we’re like, “Oh, well, the marketing process does this…” I’m like, oh no, no, no. We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process. Flip your focus on the customer 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. And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important. I’ve worked in businesses where we focus cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff is the most vital piece. And frankly, it’s an essential piece, but it’s not the crucial piece. Heidi: Yeah, it should support, and we have the tools to help that entire life cycle. When I first joined Workfront one of the things that we did was as soon as we handed off an opportunity to the sales team, it was like, we’re out, we’re done, check, we’re finished. Frankly, there are so many tools in a marketing toolkit that we can align with a selling motion and be more successful in helping to nurture prospects through a buying process. To me, that has been an evolution that has been enabled by technology and is one that is critical in ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned. Brian: As we talk about this whole idea of alignment, and you brought up measurements sounds easier said than done to get marketing and sales to agree on what common goals and measures are. How to get sales and marketing using the same numbers Heidi: I think it must start a big picture and really understanding targets and targets by sales teams and working backward from there. Because if we realize that as our goal, our goal from a marketing perspective is undoubtedly to raise awareness for the business and drive demand for the business. Our goal is to drive revenue for the business. And so, we can all understand our revenue goals and then the steps that we all need to take to get there. So, to meet our revenue goals, backing out of that, what kind of demand generation volumes do we need to have to achieve those revenue goals. We then agree with the sales team not only on what we are going to use as our qualification criteria, how we are going to evaluate whether or not a lead is indeed a good lead or a bad lead. Also, ensuring that, from a volume perspective, the ...