Yesterday, Anna and I presented Data That Supports True Sales & Marketing Alignment at the Nashville Analytics Summit. Our session identified and contextualized the data we’ve used to unite SaaS sales & marketing to ultimately drive capital-efficient, predictable growth. Being married SaaS co-founders, one responsible for sales and the other for marketing makes us uniquely sensitive to the perils of finger-pointing as well as business upsides of alignment.

Data That Supports True Sales and Marketing Alignment from Married2Growth

Get the SlideShare version of our Nashville Analytics Summit presentation deck, above.

Top-Down Importance of Sales & Marketing Alignment

The highest-level data point on a SaaS is the magic number or sales efficiency index. This answers the question of how many dollars it takes for you to acquire a dollar of annual recurring revenue (ARR). And while this is sometimes called sales efficiency, it’s really sales & marketing efficiency. The magic number is the highest-level reflection of alignment. I’ll back into that to illustrate how.

Two other high-level metrics that reflect on sales & marketing alignment are customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). CAC looks at how many sales & marketing dollars it took to acquire a new customer, and LTV looks at how much customers spend over their lifetime with you. CAC is all about sales & marketing efficiency, while LTV is very much about sales & marketing quality. In many organizations, efficiency and quality are the axes that divide rather than unite sales vs. marketing.

Magic number, CAC, and LTV are the most direct reflections of a SaaS company’s growth potential and capital efficiency. They’re also the metrics most impacted when sales & marketing alignment is prioritized and intentionally designed into the DNA of the company and its data.

Four Watershed Sales & Marketing Alignment Moments

As I mentioned, Anna and I were married co-founders of a martech SaaS. She was responsible for sales, services, and customer success, I was the CEO and responsible for marketing and ops, and our third partner Scott was responsible for product and engineering. Needless to say, as we scaled that company there was a lot of pressure to have seamless sales & marketing alignment.

Then we grew to the point where we needed a director of sales. And can you guess what he said was his top priority in his first leadership meeting? Yep, you guessed it, sales & marketing alignment. Despite being married, in martech, and fully aware of the perils, we were not aligned.

Like many SaaS companies, we were data-driven from top to bottom. Each team had a set of KPIs they were accountable to deliver. Back then, the problem was that each department was relatively siloed with KPIs myopically focused on department performance. Too little consideration was paid to broader business benefits. This was acutely true in sales and marketing.

Sales focused on activity metrics — calls, appointments, demos; and performance metrics — pipeline, bookings, up-sells, cross-sells, renewals. While marketing was riveted on volume — leads, traffic, inbounds,