Marketing Sales Alignment - Success mantra for B2B

When your firm is targetting enterprise customers, B2B marketing becomes a lot challenging as it requires much more alignment with sales. Traditionally sales and marketing teams, I would say, are 'loosly coupled' and thats mainly due to lack of binding commitment to other's success. Around 80 % of leads passed to sales are dropped and 90 % marketing collaterals are uunused. 80% of enterprise technology deals are not influenced by marketing at all. It gets further tricky by the fact that marketing is not only about revenue generation but also has to manage brand and other marketing strategies. How many times you have heard CEOs calling marketing a 'Cost center". Well almost all the time. How can you make a cost centre integral part of revenue generation engine, which is sales. A part of this attitude towards marketing is to be blamed on marketer themselves. Marketer tend to sweat on web hits, leads etc and get lost in smoke of information instead of focusing on critical but simple things which can impact Revenue. So it becomes really important for marketer to track metrics like 'marketing influenced pipeline' and 'marketing influenced revenue' as a multiple of 'marketing budget'. This will demostrate their effectiveness and help correct the perception,often incorrect, towards marketing.
So how do we align sales & marketing. For marketers its really important to understand key objectives and challenges during each stages of sales cycle. During early sales cycle, market communicatin and content should be targeted enough to keep customers engaged. Towards end of buying cycle, customers tend to worry about failures and hence marketing should work with implementation team to create collaterals which displays risk factors across the timeline and ways to mitigate them.
Sales & marketing need to create sort of structure where boundaries and interaction points are clearly defined. We can do small things like creating a dashboard on Salesforce giving insight into leads/opportunities patterns, revenue/market insights. We also also start using some sales languages like marketing-qualified leads and sales-accepted leads. Apart from CRM tools, Marketing campaign management tools like Eloqua & Marketo and Search marketing firms like Enquiro can play a huge role in bridging the gap. Once a structure is established, Alignment is done by engaging both teams in taking active roles in each other's work and then alogning their compensation based on revenue, customer renewal and customer satisfaction.