Content marketing

Conducting the Perfect Sales & Marketing Meeting: How to Effectively Reach Alignment

Two women having a meeting at a desk.

Marketing and sales alignment continues to be important, and marketing leaders continue to seek ways to strengthen the partnership and improve performance. Here we zero in on sales and marketing meetings, which can be excellent opportunities for ensuring both harmony and incremental improvement.

What Is a Sales and Marketing Meeting?

This is a periodic meeting between sales and marketing aimed at ensuring initial and ongoing alignment between the two groups. The goal is to arrive at a common understanding of and agreement around goals, tactics, expectations, strategy, and performance.

The initial marketing and sales alignment meeting typically involves leaders from each group, e.g., the CMO or Director of Marketing and VP or Director of Sales. The leaders may then form a task force with representatives across departments.  

Those driving the partnership will need to meet periodically and ensure their respective teams are executing as necessary and getting the resources they need.

Defining Goals for Your Sales and Marketing Meeting

Before you start setting goals for your actual meetings, you’ll have initial meetings where you define your joint objectives and set service level agreements (SLAs). SLAs ensure commitment between marketing and sales by defining the goals and performance expectations for both teams. 

After the direction has been set, there will be questions about follow-up meetings? How many do we need? How often do we need them? Whom should we invite?

When it comes to meetings, most marketing and sales professionals prefer the minimalist style. Often, relevant takeaways and an open feedback loop will do just fine. 

Like ad campaigns, meetings are much easier to optimize when they have a stated objective. Assigning KPIs to recurring meetings can help keep the agenda and the post-meeting actions focused. Having corollary KPIs also helps you understand how valuable the meetings are and how often they need to happen.  

Tips for Effective Sales and Marketing Meetings

Scheduling a recurring meeting for every week or two is a smart way to get started with alignment meetings. Over time, you may find that it’s suitable to meet less often, such as once per month. Beyond that, you can increase the likelihood of productive meetings by following these tips.

Schedule different meetings for different attendees

Though it’s important to hold a kickoff meeting involving everyone in the marketing and sales groups, it’s often best that only a handful of representatives from marketing and sales attend the regular ongoing meetings. Meetings with too many attendees can get bogged down and tend to be less productive. At the same time, schedule monthly meetings where marketing and sales leaders can fortify the partnership and address problems that might be derailing alignment.

Designate spokespeople from each team

Consider assigning a designated team member from each group to collect feedback during separate team meetings. These spokespeople represent their respective teams at the series of ongoing marketing and sales meetings to discuss alignment progress toward revenue goals, as well as concerns, challenges, and opportunities.

Encourage friendly interactions

In many organizations, the relationship between sales and marketing is complicated, so it may take a creative approach to get the two teams freely interacting. One idea is to set aside the first few minutes of each meeting for marketing and sales to interact in a relaxed manner. This will hopefully pave the way for meaningful dialogue during the meeting.

Keep things moving with daily stand-ups

You may want to consider daily stand-up meetings. The genesis of these is from the Agile software development manifesto and methodology, which is designed to empower cross-functional teams to effectively iterate and produce meaningful results in short time frames. Some marketing and sales organizations are embracing Agile concepts as a way to fuel customer-focused collaboration for account-based marketing efforts?

In essence, this meeting helps both teams understand what was done yesterday and what is being tackled today. Holding this meeting daily helps ensure roadblocks get addressed quickly and instills confidence that marketing and sales are truly in alignment. Plus, it offers the chance to document everyone’s activities to better gauge progress over time. One common way to do this is to use a consistent visual to chart progress on projects.

Creating Your Sales and Marketing Meeting Agenda

Agendas are the tool that keeps meetings focused and productive. Let’s review some ways you can get the most from your agenda.

Tip 1: Set a clear agenda

Make sure each meeting has a clear agenda. To ensure all agenda items are covered, note the allotted time for each item.

You’ll take a different approach with the agenda for your stand-ups, with a focus on understanding three key things:

  • What has been accomplished in the last few days?
  • What are you working on now?
  • Is there anything blocking you from what you’re working toward?

Tip 2: Keep SLAs on the agenda

Make sure to reference the SLAs at least once in every meeting agenda. The SLA is essentially a touchstone keeping both teams focused on their common goal(s), so it’s critical to keep it top of mind. An ever-present SLA also helps both teams come up with relevant action items going forward.

Tip 3: Share the agenda before meetings

Send the agenda to all attendees a few days in advance. This allows colleagues to come prepared to discuss relevant items, making for a more productive meeting. Ideally both marketing and sales will aggregate and analyze relevant data before the meeting so they can engage in productive discussions. The main idea is to empower attendees to come into meetings prepared to contribute. 

Tip 4: Close each meeting with a to-do list

Leave time at the end of each meeting for the team leads to document and assign action items. Be sure to clarify responsibilities and timelines for each. For action items requiring multiple steps, set milestones.

Common Sales and Marketing Meeting Themes

Ultimately, you want to develop a simple agenda that consistently covers relevant themes or categories. While you should customize the agenda to match the meeting’s objective, here are some common themes to consider.

Strategy spotlight

Use these meetings to amplify what’s working strategically. Showcasing examples of success is a great way to increase buy-in while allowing team members to learn about tactics they can use to improve their own results. Calling attention to cross-functional collaboration can help you instill confidence in the partnership.

SLA performance

Review SLAs in each marketing and sales alignment meeting to assess how well the combined teams’ efforts are contributing to achieving the goals. Remember to avoid placing blame for any failure to meet SLAs. Instead, SLAs should be presented as a useful measurement for keeping everyone focused on working toward a common goal.

Content, campaign and competition review

Marketing should share details about both planned and in-progress campaigns and content, specifically outlining how sales can make use of these. It’s also helpful for marketing to highlight content and offers that are performing well, so sales knows which content to prioritize in their prospect outreach and nurturing. 

For their part, sales should share feedback on which content and offers are resonating well and which are falling flats. These meetings are also a prime opportunity for sales to share insights on the competition.

Buyer engagement and trends

Sales should share what they’re seeing in terms of buyer engagement. Marketing should share insights gleaned from market and internal research, such as trending topics for conversations and which content might work best for facilitating those conversations.

Use Linkedin to Improve Sales and Marketing Meetings

To ensure effective and insightful meetings, call upon data from the LinkedIn platform, including performance data from Linkedin’s Sales Solutions and LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions.     

Use LinkedIn for pre-meeting research

Opinion-based arguments can be a big waste of time. During meetings, the discussion shouldn’t be about what the data is, it should be about how to improve it. 

LinkedIn provides a wide range of valuable performance data on both sides of the marketing and sales equation. Use these metrics to your advantage by naming them in your SLAs and recurring agenda items. Doing so allows both teams to be more prepared for meetings because the agenda items speak to the same data points they’re seeing within their daily workflows. 

Use analytics in Campaign Manager to understand performance

Campaign Manager is the tool marketers use to run and optimize ad campaigns on LinkedIn. Through this virtual command center, marketers can monitor campaign performance in real-time and bring up-to-date results to sales and marketing meetings.

Call upon Sales Navigator data for pipeline management

LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides visibility into prospect engagement and pipelines, empowering sales professionals to better manage performance. Using data from Sales Navigator, marketing and sales can drill down into specific accounts and engagement tactics.

Take advantage of conversion tracking in Campaign Manager

Using LinkedIn Conversion Tracking, marketing can easily report on the leads, sign-ups, content downloads, purchases, and other desired actions that can be attributed to their LinkedIn campaigns. Seeing what’s causing the desired actions helps sales team members uncover content-sharing tactics they can use to engage their own contacts.

Use Meetings to Reinforce Commitment

Any organization dedicated to marketing and sales alignment is on the right track. The key to success is addressing both the strategy and the tactics for driving and maintaining alignment. By mastering the ins and outs of sales and marketing meetings and agendas, you’re setting the stage for successful collaboration.

To get started making your own alignment visions reality, visit The Art of Winning hub and download our eBook.