Salesforce on Salesforce: Building Marketing & Sales Alignment

Editor's Notes

• #2: Almost a year ago to the day, our Marketing team was sitting in a cramped room in Salesforce’s Indianapolis office. We had been there all day in our Annual Planning meeting, gearing up for the second half of the year planning. Now at this point in the day we had brainstormed and discussed so many amazing demand generation campaigns that we were pretty fried. But we had an important 30 minutes allotted to reviewing the numbers and pipeline coverage for the second half of the year. Like any session where you are reviewing rows and rows of data after sitting in a room all day, people in the room were beginning to look down at their phones until one person raised their hand and said “whoa whoa, go back to that.” For the next 30 minutes, using a series of data tools, we peeled back the layers of a major gap in pipeline coverage for the second half of the year for one of our biggest market segments. There was a major iceberg ahead and if we didn’t turn the ship, we’d run into it. Meaning, we had to come together as a marketing team to build pipeline that would close this fiscal year. What came to pass would be a dramatic swing in momentum thanks to Marketing identifying a major weakness and developing programs to assess the damage. But it wasn’t just Marketing … in order for a huge shift like this to occur, Sales had to be a major player; and they were! This is just one example of how Salesforce’s Sales & Marketing Alignment has played such a crucial role in our company growth. I don’t mean to tease the story but the person that quarterbacked the campaign is Daniel Newman and will be going through it in detail soon.Today we're talking about Sales & Marketing Alignment at Salesforce and before we get further into the details of this story, I am going to explain how we got to this moment. Unfortunately, I don't have any 'Self-Help' formulas to take back to your teams, however, I do have stories and examples of how we got to where we are today through a lot of trial and error. 
• #3: This slide is important because we need to connect with our audience here… Observe the customer experience. There are plenty of models available, many companies have different interpretations of them. Regardless at the end of the day, a customer comes to find Salesforce through some type of awareness whether it be an Ad or word of mouth. Salesforce captures their information, nurtures then passes to sales who then goes through the process of converting into an opportunity and finally a sale. True? Cool, I see a lot of nodding heads. Each prospect progresses through the cycle through levels of interest. We bring each prospect through the cycle by introducing a need and that need has to be personalized to that company in some form. We speak to many companies and in most cases, they put a divide down the middle of this cycle. Marketing is in charge of developing high quality leads and passing to sales. Sales is in charge of closing them. To get to this alignment you need to understand simple items like The definition of this cycle Be able to report on each point How to work together to advance prospects in the cycle at scale
• #4: At Salesforce, we believe that Sales and Marketing own the entire funnel. In order to sell our products, we develop a Vision for each prospect. To do that, the vision and the messaging has to be something that Sales and Marketing both own. Owning the entire journey is a great step towards alignment but it also raises questions: How do you both define the cycle? How are you both held accountable? How do you measure success? To put both Sales and Marketing in the driver’s seat of the 
• #5: The experiences that Sales & Marketing provides to customers today didn't happen over night. It's been a journey of evolution where we have had to change with our growth, customer expectations, mediums and technology available to us.At the core of our alignment has been a foundation that still holds true to this day. The first is that we log everything in our CRM -which just so happens to be Salesforce. We are fortunate enough to speak with a lot of companies and sales and marketing alignment comes up a lot. One of the questions I always ask is where are you logging your sales activities and your marketing data? Most of the time the answer is the same in that it's scattered across different Marketing Automation or ABM platforms, Excel spreadsheets or homegrown CRMs. To stay aligned, we have a single source of truth. That means we're all looking at the same data and there is no confusion between both parties. The second is that we agree on the lead and opportunity lifecycle. This is so important often times overlooked. 50% of companies do not have a common definition of a customer lifecycle. This gives us the ability not only to understand how can Marketers supply Sales throughout every step in the lifecycle journey, it allows us to get very prescriptive with how we support. Finally, equally as important if not the most important pillar is alignment on a mission. I know we have a lot of marketers in this room and one of our favorite things to do to Sales and Leadership is to throw up impressive numbers on a slide like Web Traffic, Impressions, Likes. And guess what... Marketing can pull a lot of these metrics. The best way to solve for Sales saying 'What have you done for me' is to simplify a common mission. For us, we agree that a Pipeline is the sign of a Healthy Business. We also agree that Sales's mission is to hit every month's revenue targets. So whatever Marketing does, no matter if it's an event or social media post, we always try strive to tie it back to Pipeline or Revenue. For example, we don't have Sales & Marketing Alignment meetings, we have 'Pipe Council Meetings'.
• #6: Must know that this is Salesforce’s journey
• #20: Talk about what Pardot is...
• #27: Pardot for Financial Services First Call Deck Deck Recording MC Certification Who: All FINS MC Account Executives (SB - ENT) + BDRs Deadline: 9/7 What: MC Account Executives + BDRs present Pardot for FINS First Call Deck. This must be tailored to a specific customer (prospect or open oppty). Reps should not read the talk track word-for-word. They must make it their own. How: Account Executives record video presenting deck and add link to recording (in Google Drive) here. RVPs then watch recording and certify teams (here) based on the following criteria: if I were a prospect, would I want to continue the conversation or set up a next call? MC Certification Instructions + Overview Doc Core Certification to follow MC Certification from 9/10 - 9/14 for all FINS Reps reporting to MichAccount Executivel Hartman.
• #32: We incentivize our Sales Teams - because if close 5 more 20k deal form this program - it will pay 10x and we see an uplift by much more than that
• #34: Wealth Session w/ Sequoa - CTA
• #43: “In B2B marketing you have two customers, you have your end customer and you have your sales team. We think B2B Marketers need to think much more about revenue, much more about pipeline and much more about business that the team is booking.”
• #48: At Salesforce, we There are so many factors that go into alignment.