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Alignment of targets is a source of competitive differentiation that few organizations master. A common approach is to set different targets for sales and marketing teams without shared goals between the two collaborating partners. 

What is new: Growth leaders put marketing and sales in the revenue camp, with marketing as the artillery supporting the sales infantry. 

Why it matters: Business alignment is vital in any organization going through revenue transformations or introducing new business models. 

Net sales covering everything: Net sales numbers are obvious for putting all marketers and sales professionals in the revenue camp. However, leaders must define such targets to reflect the length of sales cycles. 

In reality, yearly sales targets, encompassing a part of a business-to-business sales cycle, often eliminate the early stages where marketing has the most significant impact. 

This results in two main strategic options for the alignment of goals 

• Align revenue goals through plans covering the length of the whole sales cycle 
• Add marketing components to in-year net sales targets to shape opportunities closing next year. 

Alignment process: Alignment of targets is a two-step process: first, deciding what the two teams shall accomplish, and second, defining how to measure fulfillment by steering towards crucial success metrics. 

When defining these from scratch every year, you miss out on experiences gained in previous initiatives. A superior alternative is to create and maintain a playbook with proven metrics for each type of accomplishment. 

Types of accomplishments: Your playbook and game plans vary with customer types, market maturity, and market positions. Seven categories of outcomes can serve as a starting point. 

Reinforce customer loyalty/relationships for your existing business

Your existing customers and offerings are central for revenues today and direction for tomorrow. Expect this to be crucial when you are in a healthy market and where you are THE market leader. 

💡Possible joint marketing and sales metrics are 

• Core elements of your value proposition – why customers selected you in the first place, e.g., price, quality, service levels 
• Net promoter score (NPS) 

Your events can be central for relationship building in businesses with long sales cycles. 

• Customers seeing demonstrations of new offerings 
• Customers listening to your presentations 
• Customers engaging in conversations over meals or drinks

Relationship-building initiatives grow insights about current pain points and future opportunities ahead of being qualified and quantified. 

Grow current business in existing accounts 

In established markets, you can grow your account market share at the expense of weaker players. A strategy often pursued by leading and consolidating players. 

💡Possible success measures for these values are: 

• Recurring revenue share of total revenues year over year. 
• Account share – play for the variable awards
• Capture vendor reduction potential – swap out competitors 
• Grow sales quarter-by-quarter

Expand into adjacent opportunities 

Your existing customers represent an opportunity to increase your business share by expanding into adjacent opportunities—options explored by leveraging your existing footprint combined with adjacent solutions or product bundles. 

💡Possible success measures here are:

• Expansion of solution scope for an existing business. 
• Successful bundling of two or more offerings, core plus adjacent/emerging offerings. 
• Account wins through vendor expansion in a high-volume category. 

Explore new opportunities with high growth potential 

Entirely new opportunities with high growth potential are innovation-heavy and characterized by high risk and rewards. It takes a lot to nail the first customer’s needs, solution, and business model. 

This 0 -> 1 challenge goes beyond delivering proof-of-concept, measured by light-house customers placing commercial contracts and becoming a public reference. 

💡Possible success measures for innovations like this are: 

• Lighthouse customer win (proof of concept converted to commercial contract) 
• Validated market needs; minimum viable product or hand-shake requirement specification
• Opportunity sizing (volume estimate x price estimates) 
• Required ecosystem partnerships in place 
• Lighthouse customer turned into a public reference. 

Scale your proven business innovations 

By separating the “nailing” and “scaling” of new business innovations, you can establish metrics that best describe progress in two diverse business disciplines. 

Scaling an existing innovation is about market timing, speedy execution, and re-use of hard-earned insights from light-house customer projects. 

💡Posdible measures to scale success are: 

• Volume ramp-up for lighthouse customer 
• New account wins representing large volume accounts 
• Account market share in initial contracts: sole supplier, prime partner, second vendor, or niche supplier
• Quarter-by-quarter growth of orders booked 

Increase pipeline velocity 

Increasing pipeline velocity allows you to gain competitive strengths in mature commodity and product-driven markets. An activity focusing on the whole value chain from initial contact to signed contract. 

💡Possible success measures for pipeline acceleration are:

• New opportunities identified through digital marketing programs 
• New opportunities from proactive sales prospecting or customers reaching out. 
• Time from qualified lead to signed contract 
• The total value of the pipeline 

Grow your customers’ business

When customers invest in your products to grow their revenues, there can be an opportunity for you to accelerate your customers’ growth. This is hard to do for light-house customers and early adopters but is in play for customers further down as you scale your business. 

Possible measures here are 

• Customer sales to capex ratios 
• Customer ROI for your offerings 
• Customer revenues in new growth segments 

Essential questions for your marketing and sales teams

1. Which joint goals do we have for marketing and sales today? 
2. How does the length of our revenue targets correlate with our sales cycles? 
3. What is the horizon for our revenue targets? Anything beyond annual goals? 
4. Which type of gaols are most valuable to ensure marketing and sales are in the revenue-generating camp? 

Additional reading suggestions 

• The 7 most important measures to measure in Business [BLOGPOST] – by Maptive 
• Market Expansion: How to identify, assess and choose adjacencies wisely [BLOGPOST] – by VisionEdgeMarketing 
• Pipelines, platforms and the new rules of strategy [ARTICLE] – by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Harvard Business Review 
• 5 best practices for managing your pipeline [ BLOGPOST] – by GTMnow