Two New Year’s Resolutions For Sales and Marketing Leaders

1. Dig deeper into How to meet or exceed annual goals. Setting quotas, targets, and metrics are the “What” and are lagging indicators. Knowing “How” to meet or exceed goals is essential.

For example, suppose marketing has a target of delivering leads that represent $1 million in new sales. In that case, marketing needs to know the average deal size, win ratio, and sales cycle length to determine how many and what type of leads need to be delivered monthly. If the sales cycle is six months, then marketing needs to provide the required leads by the end of June to impact 2023.

Action: Assist sales and marketing teams to do the math and set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for the year. SMART goals can be developed for individual contributors, teams and entire departments or functions.

2. Strengthen sales and marketing alignment. Alignment is aligning the goals, strategies, and efforts of an organization’s sales and marketing teams. When sales and marketing are aligned, they work towards common goals and use consistent messaging and tactics to reach and engage potential customers. This helps improve efficiency and drive better results for the organization.

Action: There are several ways that sales and marketing alignment can be achieved, including:

• Set common goals and metrics for both teams to work towards.
• Ensure that messaging and branding are consistent across both teams to help establish a clear and consistent brand identity that resonates with customers.
• Encourage collaboration and communication between the sales and marketing teams. Regular meetings, cross-functional project teams, and other opportunities for cooperation can help to ensure that both teams are working towards the same goals.
• Develop a clear and aligned sales and marketing strategy that includes identifying target markets, creating targeted messaging and campaigns, and aligning sales and marketing efforts to drive results.