This week’s episode is with Dave Rigotti,. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can check it out below.
Every company aims to achieve marketing and sales alignment.
But how to do it?
Why not ask a leader at one of the world’s top marketing companies, Marketo?
On the latest FlipMyFunnel podcast, guest host Daniel Rodriguez quizzed Dave Rigotti, Head of Enterprise Demand Generation & ABM for Marketo, an Adobe Company, about how to get sales and marketing to work hand-in-glove
This is a topic Rigotti is uniquely suited to talk about. He was VP of Marketing at Bizible. Bizible was then acquired by Marketo, which a month later was acquired by Adobe. In two months, he went from doing ABM for a company of 100 employees to one that had 20,000.
What Drives Sales and Marketing Alignment?
The number one question to ask to see how aligned your departments are is “what are the goals for marketing and what are the goals for sales?”
If marketing’s goals are to generate leads or to have an awesome conference, and sales is saying their goal is bookings, or hitting a revenue number, then the teams are fundamentally misaligned.
For sales and marketing to align, they have to shoot for the same metrics. Traditionally, marketing has been measured by X number of leads, and sales by Y level of revenue.
Sales and marketing have different time horizons.
Marketing driving the pipeline is not about the sales bookings this month. It’s about making sure sales has the right amount of opportunities in three, four, or six months.
To make sure marketing understands which leads translate into wins, Rigotti has the marketing team attend sales bookings and even post-purchase meetings.
Alignment = Compensation
Rigotti is super passionate about compensation because you can say you are aligned on marketing and sales all day, but until people are personally held accountable for delivering the success metrics you’ve agreed on, it’s all talk.
For the last five years, Rigotti’s compensation has been tied to bookings because that’s what matters. Just as salespeople are measured and compensated on revenue, so should marketing people be.
The idea is never to have marketing say “we hit our goals but sales didn’t.”
Rigotti wants marketing and sales to have the same emotions at the end of the third month of the quarter.
“We don’t get our full paychecks if sales doesn’t, and I think that’s the right way to do it,” says Rigotti.
Marketing Works the Sales Process Harder
When marketing and sales are in each other’s meetings, the crew starts rowing together and looking for increased efficiencies.
A motivated marketing team is incentivized to create better outbound sequences and call scripts, and examine which accounts sales is cold calling and which get outbound marketing.
As far as Rigotti is concerned, everyone is marketing. Everyone is sales.
This post is based on an interview by guest host Daniel Rodriguez with Dave Rigotti, Head of Enterprise Demand Generation & ABM for Marketo,an Adobe Company. To hear this episode and many more like it, you can subscribe to The FlipMyFunnel Podcast.
