If you have been following this blog, you will remember that we last left off discussing the “crisis of trust and confidence” that many times happens between sales and marketing groups. As we all finalize our strategic planning for the New Year, it’s important that sales and marketing teams take this planning time as an opportunity to collaborate and work together as one “demand generation” group.
In the previous installment to this blog, it was recommended that sales and marketing alignment begin with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Take a quick read of that blog to get the back story and then continue on with this one.
Once you have your SLA in place. You need a plan – how you are going to implement the SLA. A best practice that I’ve employed over the years is called the “Joint Business Plan”. Just like the SLA, it also has an acronym – the JBP.
The JBP puts the SLA in motion. It’s the implementation and how the marketing and sales teams create their synergy. The JBP is a series of meetings with resulting actionable plans that are managed in a planning document.
Starting with the “annual planning session”, where the teams jointly develop the annual sales and marketing plans – how your company is going to generate demand and close the resulting opportunities. It ensures agreed upon direction (product, message, and revenue) and outlines tasks to reach the KPIs – usually by quarterly goals.
Hold bi-annual meetings to review first half and then full year performance – this allows for mid-year changes to the plan and roll-up reporting of your joint performance to the executive level. Every quarter, the management teams should come together and hold a quarterly business review. This meeting is to ensure that agreed upon KPI, tactics and action plans are being delivered and each one should be scored in a way that allows for the teams to measure themselves on how they have (or have not) been delivering on their promises. If modifications or tweaks to the plan need to be made, it’s in this meeting that those changes are approved.
Some companies decide to hold monthly meetings. Typically, if you have short sales cycles and your business is dynamic enough to require monthly meetings, then definitely meet that often. Otherwise, a monthly recap of historical performance and upcoming planned actions should be delivered to the team via email or posting to a collaboration site on your intranet.
The point here is that the JBP is a living and breathing document and process. It never stops. It keeps the teams aligned and communicating. The SLA is just a piece of paper without the JBP – it’s only as good as the implementation!!
