Measuring Alignment

As important it is for businesses to measure marketing effectiveness, so is evaluating marketing and sales alignment. Marketing working in isolation can’t produce the best results for a company. Aligning the two departments can significantly improve marketing ROI as well as sales productivity. There is no dearth of techniques out there to measure the success of marketing efforts, but what if we would want to understand how aligned (or misaligned) marketing and sales are.

The Forbes article addresses this very issue. It talks about three key metrics that a company can use to measure the degree of alignment between marketing and sales.

§  End-to-End Conversion Metric - “Measures the conversion ratio for the full revenue cycle well as for each of the major stages – from market attraction through sales close and customer lifetime value.”

§  Revenue Diversity Metric - “measures the productivity of lead generation.”

§  Outcome Profitability Metric - “measures profit attributable to each specific business problem or “outcome” sold to. This gives visibility into how well sales and marketing understand the buyers, their business problems and how effective they are in pursuing those opportunities.”

Although measuring these metrics needs quite a bit of serious work, it surely seems to be worth the process as these are the starting point of understanding how closely or how apart are the two departments working.