One of the fastest ways to achieve sales and marketing alignment, is to have shared targets.

Sales professionals are often paid commissions on how many meetings they book, their rate of conversion from meeting to opportunity, and a percentage of closed-won deals.

Marketers key performance indicators are generally tied to traffic, click-through rates, and the number of leads generated. Marketers live at the top of the funnel, and sales at the bottom. You don't have a sales team and a marketing team. You have a revenue team.

According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, "Companies with strong marketing and sales alignment "see 20% annual revenue growth." Revenue targets should, and need to be, shared by your sales and marketing teams. The middle of the funnel is where qualifications live, and your revenue team begins. In order to establish your revenue team, you must first show your sales and marketing team where they overlap. Traditional roles and responsibilities leave a gap in the middle of your sales and marketing funnel. Now that your sales and marketing teams are overlapping in the funnel, they can equally be connected to the revenue.

For example, a digital marketer, sales has traditionally owned the qualification stage. When we established a revenue team, marketing shared in the qualifying of leads, and booking qualified appointments became the standard. Let me put this a different way. Our sales team was walking in the door with 10 to 15 booked marketing qualified meetings every week, and these are hot leads because marketing is collecting all the necessary data points that sales would normally have to get through multiple calls. Which gives sales more time for closing actions, which leads to more revenue.

Understanding the revenue target is owned by both teams, allows for a more collaborative middle, no longer feeling like your job is to just generate leads, or to close them, but to create a more well-qualified contact which increases the chance of revenue attainment.

Your next step is simple.

In your next sales and marketing meeting, brainstorm ways to create a middle of the funnel revenue team. There's an old saying, "Many hands make light work." the hope is that this starts a conversation in your business that shared qualification creates revenue, and you now have a basic framework for how to start building your revenue team.

If sales and marketing teams are aligned and achieving goals on their shared metrics, it's essential that your company recognizes and appreciates their work.

We often move fast and push so hard, that it's easy to not make this a priority. At Digital Marketer, we decided to engrain recognition into our core values. We call it, celebrate the wins.

Now, sales and marketing alignment is definitely a win, but making sure you slow down and celebrate together is key. Here are a few ways we have seen this play out:

Inclusive language.
Traditionally, when the last day of the month hits and the sales team hits quota, we take to Slack and email to congratulate them, but it's a one-sided win. Truly aligned sales and marketing teams get a mutual shout out. At Digital Marketer when we hit our sales number, we take to Slack and email with a new message. Congratulations sales and marketing for hitting your revenue goals. This not only brings the teams together, but it also solidifies the idea that sales and marketing equally own revenue.
Joint parties and company outings.
There's something special about the company picking up the tab, especially when it's to celebrate a win. It doesn't have to be fancy and it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg. You simply have to carve out the time and space to make your team feel appreciated. Taking your sales and marketing team on a company outing to celebrate a great month or a quarter, reinforces that alignment is more than just something nice we say around the office.
Awards.
Typically, sales and marketing teams have their own awards for top performers. Regardless of the type of reward you settle on, you should to make that one award for both sales and marketing teams. It might sound simple, but it sends a very powerful message to the rest of the company, and shows your teams you are serious about alignment.

Take a moment and think through what celebrating the wins would look like in your organization. Try to come up with at least three ways that you could do this while including both the marketing and the sales team. Celebrating the wins is a simple, yet powerful way, to keep your teams aligned and engaged.