Salesforce’s CMO: Why Our Marketing and Sales Teams Actually Like Each Other
Simon Mulcahy, Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce
Tight alignment between sales and marketing has always been a fundamental aspect of Salesforce’s business performance. As we’ve grown, it has become more and more important to understand the factors that matter the most in making this partnership a success: delivering on marketing ROI, sales productivity, and, most importantly, growth.
1. Customer Focus
Putting customer success first means creating a single, holistic view of the customer relationship. It’s also it’s important to cultivate active listening. On paper, a marketing tactic may seem like genius, but in reality, it may fail to move the customer to the next step in the sales cycle. A key part of aligning sales and marketing is the validation of go-to-market tactics and marketing assets early on with real-life customers, and with salespeople themselves. As a result, the marketing team will speak the language of the customer and generate value at every stage in the funnel.
2. Pipeline Science
All too often, marketing operates with only a vague understanding of its impact. A true partnership with sales can’t be reached unless the marketing team is fully aware of what it’s achieving or not achieving. At Salesforce, we accomplish this by constantly evolving a “pipeline science” approach, where every single marketing activity is tracked and evaluated. Additionally, our view of pipeline goes beyond revenue generation, and includes customer evangelism. We apply just as rigorous an approach to turning customers into evangelists as we do to generating sales wins. After all, customers are some of the most trusted evangelists a company can have.
3. Integrated Planning and Alignment
Sales and marketing can’t operate off of conflicting plans or confusion about their roles. Too often, marketers and salespeople have different goals, and become frustrated when the other team doesn’t understand their objectives. A single plan needs to orchestrate effort and confirm common objectives.
4. Communicate Excellence and Transparency
It’s amazing how often assumptions and lack of communication fuel bad or “no” decisions. The market changes quickly for many reasons, and plans can quickly lose their impact. That’s why it’s important to get feedback and react to it rapidly. Creating a real-time view of sales and marketing performance is also helpful.
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