Marketing-sales misalignment equals massive waste: LinkedIn

Instead of focusing on the handoff of leads between marketers and salespeople, businesses should shift to addressing the buyer's journey, according to multiple speakers at LinkedIn's Tech Connect 2018 in Singapore.

"When companies define success by handoffs, they are not allowing themselves to define success by business outcomes," said Assaf Tarnopolsky, director of marketing solutions for SEA, North Asia and Japan at LinkedIn. "If a marketing team hands off a lead to a sales person and they don't action that lead, there has been no positive business outcome."

Quite obviously, when leads generated by marketing teams are not aligned with the customer segmentation identified by the sales team, problems around outcomes persist. Tarnopolsky implores business teams to think about aligning sales and marketing teams across every step of the buyer's journey for better outcomes.

"What if marketing teams were involved in the sales process?" he asked. "What if they had a front row seat to the pain and joy of the sales team as they plan out their year? Imagine an ABM [account-based marketing] campaign that helped accelerate the buyer through their journey—10% faster, 20% faster. That would be a better metric than a handoff."

According to Melissa Murray Bailey, senior director of sales solutions for Asia-Pacific at LinkedIn, businesses need to line up the KPIs of marketing-qualified leads and the sales-qualified leads.

"When we see marketing and sales alignment, the impact on revenue is overwhelming," said Bailey. "We're seeing faster growth in both revenue and margin and we're seeing higher win rates."

In facilitating its interest to serve the alignment between marketing and sales, LinkedIn has expanded its industry profit tool to serve members, companies, educators, and address skill gaps.

"We now have 50 million standardised skills on our platform, acknowledged by both employer companies and individuals," said Matt Tindale, MD of Australia & New Zealand at LinkedIn, adding that with over two million pieces of content shared on the platform, in the form of articles, videos, and whitepapers, LinkedIn is the ideal bridge for delivering knowledge based on customer intent.