Winning Together: How Aligned Sales and Marketing Teams Close More Deals

[music] welcome everyone to our webinar winning together how aligned sales and marketing teams close more deals your hosts today are Demitri litski he's influ CEO and myself Rodney rasmason I am impl Senior product marketing manager I'll be steering the ship today but Demitri will be here jumping throughout the webinar to kind of give his years of sales and marketing wisdom with us and also answering questions at the end so today's agenda we're going to um in our short time together we'll cover what does it mean to be or not to be aligned we'll talk about the influence that alignment has on Pipeline and conversion we'll demo our new sales and marketing alignment dashboard which we're super excited about including how to use this dashboard and its metrics to measure your alignment at your own organization we'll also share some tips on how winning teams align for success and there will also be like I mentioned sometime at the end for Q&A if you do think of a question along the way please please add it to the question box in

zoom and we'll get to as many as possible all right so in the famous words of Billy Shakespeare we're friends so I can call him Billy um I think most people call him William but to be aligned or not to be aligned that is the question you may have heard this worded differently but I'm pretty sure this is the exact quote from Hamlet uh please do not fact check me on that though uh there are so many different ways that you can measure alignment between your sales and your marketing efforts for the the purposes of this webinar today we're going to focus on two key metrics so number one marketing to sales handoff when a contact has been prioritized by marketing for sales Outreach does sales actually know that that person has been handed off to them do they know what they're supposed to do and do they actually reach out to them and then number two marketing and sales audience overlap so what contacts are being targeted by marketing which ones are being outreached by sales or both and it looks really simple here it's like you know one the other or together in our

Vin diagram but we're actually going to show that it gets a little more complicated than that but we're we make it super easy to understand and to um visualize those audiences and then to kind of know what to do with them so we recently as a company conducted a study about the state of sales and marketing alignment in 2025 this involved Gathering data from over a hundred companies across a wide range of Industries and sizes that are all using influ for their contact level advertising we then turn those findings into a report and you're all going to get a free copy of that report at the end of this webinar it is chalk full of amazing nuggets of wisdom and insights and uh some things that you can do at your company to increase your alignment um so we'll show some of those highlevel insights from the the study or from the report here in the webinar today but again at the end you'll get that full thing that you can dive into on your own as well as share with your team So after talking to these or crunching the numbers of these over 100 companies we just discovered that 40% 47% of them

reported an effective marketing to selles handoff that's good uh but just 11% of them had both effective handoff and a high audience overlap so that number may seem low the 11% we're actually going to discuss later when and why that might be actually by Design um Dimitri in your experience what might be causing a higher than expected number of broken handoffs for a company well there are multiple reasons um one important um thing to mention here is that this study is is not the questionnaire not the survey it's actually what we seeing in the actual data and in actual you know signal that uh we we voice them how they pass through the organization and and how sales people respond to the signal that they're getting from from from us right so this is real data and then yeah I think like I think it's ultimately A salesperson decision if to use this s

that signal or not right so I think we don't we don't need to be dogmatic here and like broken head does not mean something bad is happening at the same time it's an opportunity to understand you know like wh why the signal is not relevant for this person for this account executive or self-development uh representative and how to make this signal more useful and sometimes it just like overlooks sometimes it's intentional so it provide a lot of additional detail that can Will di deeper okay and do you think a lot of companies think that they have a higher percentage than let's say that 11 that they actually do think they have good overlap and good um good handoff but it's actually the numbers say differently and and have a much different picture of what's Happening yeah I think I think most people um are sistic about what's happening in their company uh just as I am so I think when you look at the real data we look at our own data we were kind of surprised and again like our numbers look good but still there are

like it's not 100% right so I think there's a lot of things to learn from from this data so I think it's it's always interesting perspective yeah and we'll dig into that a little bit more about kind of some of those numbers and we'll also show some some examples of uh companies and what they look like um with those numbers so how does another thing that we um wanted to look at in the same study was how does alignment or misalignment actually influence Pipeline and conversion uh so those 11% of companies that had both the effective handoff and the high audience overlap had an average of 29% of their pipeline influenced by marketing really good um as you can see when you take away one of those areas either the handoff or the the audience overlap that number drops pretty significantly and then when we look at conversion how is how is the alignment boosting their conversion we saw a similar pattern uh that it does Boost Revenue which then boosts or sorry boost conversion which then boost Revenue so again being

aligned in one area or the other provides a good boost 51% 73% but if you want to maximize that boost in our case an average of 87% you'll want to be aligned in both of these areas so now is the part that I'm super excited about we're going to pop in and see a demo of our new sales and marketing alignment dashboard this has been in the works for a while here at Inlet um today we're going to show you what it looks like just at a high level um and show you kind of how you can use it to analyze and improve your alignment but Demetri before we jump in can you give a little background about why influ created this dashboard yeah well I think we look at like why why sometimes we see like like not enough success with our customers and I think in and that's like how this uh research or study that you mentioned was built is basically we initially looked at for ourselves trying to understand what else can we do to make our customers more successful and the main reason for unsuccessful implementations was actually like broken hand out right

and then um B so there is like I think the next logical step was like hey can we provide a tool that will enable our clients to understand what is happening right so I think again like there a lot of challenges as you build like Markin set alignment process and we we we felt we can equip our customers with with right with very convenient and simple way to look at what is happening and why if something's happening wrong like why this I think that was the intention yeah okay awesome all right so let's jump in I'm gonna go back here and pop in so uh this is for all influ to customers this V2 customers this is available um just under the report tab it's called sales and marketing alignment dashboard and once you're in there the first thing you'll notice is that you can adjust your filters so uh you can make little changes and just and based on what you do there your

alignment dashboard down here will adjust so keep your eyes down here I'm going to make a little change and Boop it just pops over and uh gives you these different views so you can play around with it you can kind of look at what is um most important to you as as an organization and here uh we see this really nice visual display so you can understand your audience size and also overlap So I myself I'm a really visual learner I appreciate something like this like numbers are great but it's good to see um kind of what these audience sizes look like against each other and what areas they overlap uh and so I'm going to go through each of these and just quickly Define what five metrics we're looking at so first is warm-up audience so this is anyone all the people that were targeted by marketing but not outreached by sales the next one is broken handoff so this is people that were prioritized for sales Outreach but they were not outreached next is cold so kind of the opposite of the warm-up audience which is they're outre they've been outreached by sales

but they have not been targeted by marketing then we have our shared audience which is people targeted by marketing and Outreach by sales and then the last one is our aligned handoffs so again kind of the opposite of the broken handoffs these were people that were prioritized for sales Outreach and sales did in fact reach out to them now if we go down here the next section is giving some stats about current alignment so for example here we have all the the percentage of our marketing targeted audience that was Outreach by sales and then our sales Outreach audience that was targeted by marketing and then the last one is that successful handoff so we're basically taking the numbers from here and crunching them so that you can see how aligned you are in these different areas um each of these has a little tool tip as well so if you're using the product and you you want to kind of get a better definition as well as some recommendations of what to do with this number uh that pops up right there for

example on this one our recommendation is if you want to increase this number get this percentage higher you can jump down here to this warm-up audience and figure out how to get them um moved toward the Outreach audience with sales now every organization is different you may not want to do that but just some some simple tips and tricks along the way uh this is one that you may want to keep an eye on again because successful handoff is such a big indicator of that alignment which again we mentioned boosts your conversion it boosts your um all these other things that we want to see in our organization the next section is called Pathways to alignment so this gives you uh some contact lists that you can then use to uh like I mentioned you know if if you want to raise this number you can use this list um the broken handoff one is obviously very important again so you can even click into here and you'll get the full list and then you can download it and decide what to do with that decide how you can better um increase alignment with your sales organization

Etc and then the last section down on the bottom is called pipeline influence so this basically helps you see how um alignment has affected your program success how has it affected how your opportunities generated your opportunities progressed rest and your opportunities one and then we divide each of these into those that were influenced by influ and those were that were not so you can kind of see the the value that it's adding there all right that's our demo um I'm going to pop back into the slides here so you saw the visual dashboard you saw kind of how we look at these five metrics uh in in different ways and now I'm going to show you some examples of real fake companies uh the first one is called score Shield and I actually want to pretend like these are real companies so I'm going to give them all a little backstory um I'm going to pretend that based on the name score Shield is they sell Shields that you can take to sporting events to avoid being hit by stray balls um so I'm I'll give you a few seconds to look at their alignment

metrics what do you notice here what pops out to you so what I see is score Shield was aligned on 645 contacts meaning they again were prioritized for sales Outreach sales did in fact reach out in comparison they only have 140 broken handoffs which is really good comparatively low that's results in basically an 82% effective handoff rate so score Shield is uh looking good in that way our next company is called bonv volt let's say that they make electric surfboards uh just again based on the name but what do you notice about their metrics what's different here all right we're kind of seeing the opposite problem that we saw with score shield with the last company so they have a huge number of broken handoffs especially compared to that aligned uh Outreach metric or audience so I don't know I heard a rumor that Bayan Volt's

entire sales team they won like an unlimited annual top golf membership and a raffle at some golf tournament so they've just been like having fun golfing every day and not they just kind of are forgetting to reach out to to their contacts um oh wa sorry I'm being fact checked in real time I guess that rumor is not true please do not spread that uh I think the truth is that their strategy is to have their sales team really focused on these SE Suite roles really engaged with director plus roles at really high value accounts so marketing is able to run this really big awareness campaign at scale targeting a really broad audience but sales is just really trying to maximize the little time and effort or time and resources they have this is often [clears throat] a sign also um seeing this big of a broken handoff compared to this small of aligned audience they may need to adjust the threshold for when they consider someone having intent and being ready to pass over to sales they may need to um build out more marketing

uh nurture to kind of make up for that that limited sales resource so I'm going to suggest B andv do that um I think after their next round of golf I I'm going to talk for them and let them know that that's probably what they should be doing all right next company is called Hydro AI let's say this one is uh it's like an AI water bottle that helps you drink more water throughout the day based on like what you're doing and stuff pretty cool so what's their deal what do you see in their numbers this is another example of a marketing team that's targeting a really broad audience and they also have this really healthy shared audience almost 4,000 contacts that are being both targeted by marketing and Outreach by sales they also have a pretty good broken handoff compared to a line so I think they're in a good in good shape here the last company is called Lumen lab um so give you a few seconds to look at that see what you notice this visually looks a little bit different um what we notice here is this company has

a really large cold audience compared to their shared audience so cold 665 shared 160 they may have a much more robust nurture or ABM program that requires a lot of marketing resources uh or it's often the case that sales and marketing are just responsible for completely different verticals or GEOS alog together so isn't necessarily bad uh every company is so unique especially one that makes oh I I don't know if I said what they do they make glowing pet beds um Lumen lab so uh they demetry can you give us some examples of when a company might have a larger than expected cold audience like this well I guess um I think that I Love Actually I love when I see this kind of picture because I see an opportunity right so I think that basically tell me that there's like like sales people do a lot of call calling or called Outreach or kind know called [clears throat] effort it could be actually called sales P plan process

with sales process and that means that uh marketing can do more right Market Mar can influence bigger audience and typically we see it for example with with larger customers who who's like multiple business units and one business unit is happily leveraging our technology while someone else just never heard about us right so it's cre an opportunity for our team to go and share the success of of one business un to another business un or geography right so in many cases it's just some geographies are still out of the out of our scope and potentially we can do more with that so ultimately I think the key question if you see a picture like this is like you why are just people still cold calling or all kind of can can we can Maring team help them and typically it's a positive answer there an opportunity to to do more so do we see this often with like when a sales company or when a sales organization is divided by go so hey I'm

responsible for this country or this territory or whatever I'm over here but marketing is Maybe covering all of them yeah it can be Geo can be multiple products uh it can be multiple bu business units and um actually can be just multiple sales teams right so it can be simple as that okay awesome so those are examples um next I want to talk about how do winning orgs winning organizations align properly and find success so what we did for this is we took those stats from the 100 plus companies but we also interviewed a few companies that are having really a lot of success in uh this alignment area and which again is boosting their revenue it's boosting their um that just their success across the organization and the things that we saw uh mentioned over and over again are these four practices now I'm not going to dive into these in a lot of detail but we do dive into them a little bit more in that report that I mentioned which again everyone's going to be getting at the end here um so you

can kind of see some actionable ways to implement these at your company but the first one is both sales and marketing need to come together to collaborate on their ICP and their target list so making sure that we really understand who we're going after and that we are uh in agreement with the way that we want to go forward next is staying together sales and marketing to map key contacts within those Target accounts so if you're only going after X number of accounts let's say let's figure out who all the people are who all the possible buyer buying group members are at that at that um company and which ones should we uh Target with marketing which ones should sales Outreach to how do we want to kind of divide and conquer those the third is to prioritize High intent contacts this seems very obvious but I think we already saw an example um of a company that is sending way too many people to

sales and sales is just not able to handle all of that there that results in that higher than expected broken handoff number so by really continually adjusting what is considered high intent what uh what threshold do we believe is the right time to pass someone over to sales you can get really in sync so that they um those people have a good experience as well as the the you know closing more deals and and getting more people to the finish line the fourth thing is that marketing should continue to provide ongoing air cover for sales they shouldn't just throw the lead over the fence and say good luck and move on and turn around they really need to be there in lock step with the sales team continuing to nurture especially in those long sales Cycles especially in those really high value accounts that may take a while but really um you know need that marketing support every step of the way Dmitri can you think of um what are some ways that that marketing is providing that that

sales assistance throughout the process Beyond when they pass the lead over can you can you think of some examples of of companies that are doing this well or just just some use cases yeah definitely well I think um I think most marketers start uh our partnership is is an idea that hey we can warm up prospects and uh I think it's and this is kind of not Brer idea that if if sales people call call you you want them to start actually reaching out to someone who expect their Outreach who know about your company so this is super targeted brand awareness effort definitely paid off however like if you think what happens after the handoff typically most of our customers spend next 6 to 12 to 18 months trying to build this relationship to to winning deal and and in this case um just stopping at this point is is is a very bad idea obviously you can like I think

the the best thing that marking can do is to continue right so to continue building relationship to build a journey and this journey should be aligned with the sales process it's again it's part of what what we can do with INF so that uh in every step of of the sales conversation and sales process all the buying group members not just the champion but all the buying group members get this perspective itive of why uh your product or service matters why they should pay attention to it and I think the the reason why is different across different s stages but anyway they can have this VAR low intrusive very nice way to know more about your product and service learn more about your why it matters why um you know like why other companies are buying your product um you know like case studies stop like like lots of great content that marketing teams create and but no one pays attention to thr the sales process simply because you know C prospects AB

busy talking to salese and salese don't always have this resources handy or don't have an opportunity to share this handy so marketing can really support and provide the air cover up until the deal is one even beyond that so we have some customers very large customers who use our technology only to Target the existing customer to upsell right so I think upsell is definitely an opportunity which is like very unusual for traditional you advertising PLS yeah and I I I think I can think of an example from my own life when um you know I'm in product marketing and and there are a lot of people that reach out trying to sell me software um and one of them I had already been talking to the sales team and had met with them a couple of times and I got some marketing emails and ads that were spe specific to what we had talked about the last time we met that the guy had done a demo I had been given access to this um kind of demo environment to play around with and I started seeing these really specific

ads and for me that was a I considered it a positive experience uh I knew that they were organized that they were in line and that um I was they actually cared about what I was seeing and you know getting relevant Outreach from marketing Beyond just again those early stages so yeah I agree all right uh we have made made it to the Q&A portion uh again if you have questions feel free to drop them in the question box in Zoom we'll answer as many as possible um we're also going to be joined Now by Tim alexandrov he's the product manager that helped build this alignment dashboard and um so if there are any other technical questions he he's available as well uh we did get one question about whether the recording will be shared yes it will so you'll have uh you'll get a followup that will have a link to a website with the recording as well as that report also you'll be able to download on the next Slide the report I we have a little QR code that will take you right to it so um the next question or the first question I want to answer

um is from someone who's attending how does inlu actually capture if someone had an impression or clicked on an ad I've noticed some people that are flagged for those sometimes are retired from their noted company or move to a different one I know this is based on the CRM database cleanliness but I'm curious how it's recorded I've cold calleded a few of those folks as a test asked if they remember engaging with their content and most have no recollection they may be moving quickly and don't remember or subconsciously engaging but I just want to make sure our outward efforts are actually influencing the targets effectively thank you um Tim do you want to answer that one yeah yeah I think that dri would you like to goad okay okay nice so that there are like there are two questions actually the first one is how info to actually capture if someone had an impression click on the add so the answer is pretty simple like it's not that simple but

it's simple on how we talk about this so INF to gather gated data from different display networks and utilizes its appropriate like appropriate ml model uh as for now we call it AI uh in order to understand who exactly C clicked on ad or view of theet for a certain number of times so it's just like AI or machine learning you can call it the way you want and the second thing is you want to be sure that the people you are showing ads are actually seeing them uh so in Li probabilistic model our model is pretty conservative so meaning that if we are not sure that click has been delivered or impression has been delivered we did not report in here in case someone saying that they do not remember about at the click uh or do not remember ad they've seen meaning that they've engaged with ad a while ago or they have a lot of content they're consuming on a daily basis and that's the reason why they they say so

you just can try to recall the latest ad you've seen in Instagram or Facebook or the latest ad you engaged with so that's why actually why we offer and ask our customers to act on clicks as fast as possible because there is certain B Gap when artifacts still being uh in play and when it makes sense to acttion those clicks hope it answer your question yeah I can just add I think can just add that to this is that people generally don't remember ads uh and that does not mean that we see so many right yeah you see so many and it does not mean it does not influence your perspective of decision you just don't recollect it uh when we launch our technology we we even tested we we put the banners with with the faces of our First Investors definitely something you would not be able not to pay attention to and even at that PO moment half of them did not pay

attention to that very obvious case right and it's was pretty hilarious but this is this is how like human brain works you you just get the information you need but you don't remember the source so that's uh and again like we have a lot of data and evidence that supports claim now across like large customer base that having the fact that people don't remember seeing your ad does not mean they don't get the value don't understand it and don't like if you act on this you actually get some very meaningful increas in conversion rates so that's kind of across all our customer base thank you um the next question is uh about whether how how you integrate the dashboard with your CRM or other marketing automation tools I think there's a concern that someone's going to have to come in every day and upload new data but can you explain a little bit Tim about how the data flows and affects the dashboard yeah actually as for now INF product integrates with a major Ser platforms like salesports

hopspot Microsoft Dynamics uh in has a bir directional integration with those platforms so meaning that to not only syn data from those platforms in order to start showing ads to to the prospect to Target but also send data back for uh various automations sales and marketing alignment purposes and uh reporting on the CRM side okay thank you U next question can you explain a little bit about the effects of alignment versus misalignment when it comes to the customers or prospect's experience so we've talked a lot about how the sales and marketing team works but how does it actually affect the the experience that the prospect has and kind of their view of your company do you want to answer that one Demitri yeah well I think um the easiest way again like is to try to put yourself in in in the shoes of your prospects and like honestly no one likes to be called cold and you know like I think probably

every every participant of this webinar already got a couple of like probably a dozen of called emails in the inbox that they had to you know to am spam or SK or unsubscribe so I think the best part of it is like sales people can really focus on those people who are interested who already kind of know about your company have initial idea about what you're doing and it's not a called outre call calling anymore right so I think and then from from Prospect standpoint you suddenly get like an email or call call it's which is not called you know who is this person you know why this person is calling you and probably it makes sense for you probably it's not that every time you want to buy this product or not every time you're kind of looking for this at this point but it's still much better experience to talk to someone who you know who you care about who paid attention to to what you did and what you're doing is a business and and it

just more smooth and better experience right thank you um and then the last question is does aligning sales and marketing teams require that they meet together often like how often should they meet together does it depend um what you know is it like they have to meet weekly or are there better ways that are non-meeting that can help them align we're definitely at I was just going to say infl to we're very much an asynchronous organization we are almost all of us are working remotely at different parts of the world and so it's not always possible to meet but what are some of the ways that people can line in other ways well I think uh there's no tool that can replace a good conversation right so I think uh we do not intend to say hey now you can you know like use Ops and and our dashboard and and things will work there's like unfortunately not such magic we still here must need to talk to

each other um I think what we do with this capability is we provide very good insights of on what you want to talk about with your s team so I think knowing what are the challenges and what is happening is very important and be informed about what is happening is very important and then obviously the more you can you know get together in chat is better having in mind that obviously like other PRI it's not your full-time job just to to chat with sales people and vice versa right so I think like we do not want to interfere in this balance of or don't want to replace it balance and do not want to replace it like the process we Empower this process with data that you can act on and you know understand what is happening so this conversation is meanful okay um and then one more question we just got are you planning to implement a native scoring for contacts for example X Impressions with one click and one

visit weighs more this might be helpful for sales bvr to filter or pick which ones to go after first yeah uh let me answer this question right so uh Adam thanks for the question so um the answer is yes uh we want to provide our product users uh specifically sales uh not only bdrs but maybe also account Executives with some proper way on how they can filter out and pick the best Prospect out of those that's existing market right now uh we are not sure whether it's going to be native scoring or some other way of data filtration prioritization and so on but we're definitely going to offer a solution for uh a proper hand picking of prospect yeah and also to add to this I think um I think the biggest problems that every every marketer U had on they start doing

like uh using our technology is like how can I what what what are the priorities about among all the signals that you're getting from our platform and by the way there will be much more signals so we're currently working on getting some very unique capabilities so that number of signals will increase right so we will get much more very important intense signal that can help sales people prioritize and make their effort more efficient and just you know get be more successful in what they're doing so having more signals means that you need to understand which signal is more important um and yes I think uh ultimately we want to leverage the fact that we have access across a lot of like data points that we're getting from like hundreds of customers by now to be able to make sense what works what doesn't work at scale across all customers and then what works for each individual customer as well so I think um this is not something

we can I can promise we roll out like immed on next quarter but definitely it's something we're currently working on is to to be able to First provide more signals but second help to make sense what signals work in what which context and help help like to decide which one is more important for for individual salesperson in their individual context so they cannect on the signal better right I think ultimately we want to provide this to to take the burden of decision which signal is important and and basically help help decide uh help make the decision uh in in the sales conversation context that every [clears throat] sales person or S development person has awesome thank you and more questions are rolling in which is great um Jennifer asks how does your AI or Predictive Analytics recommend the best next best action for sales reps and what measurable impact has this had on Deal velocity and conversion rates

I don't know if one or the other if you want to answer that yeah yeah I I think I can jump in so I guess um um so I think currently it's very simple right so we we can track who clicks on your ad and this is very strong intent signal right so whenever uh whenever someone you know pays attention to your advertising and they interested and they want to read more they click on Advertising they visit your website and like they can actually spend some time on the website so this is all very strong signals right you want to pay attention to the signals and um I think like if like our data shows that normally if a person like interacted with the that they have seen they said typically expect to have like 20 30% inion commercial rates for for a bond sales process like self development process if the person engaged which is much more attention more just typically we see

like two three times increase in conversion rates so I think this is very and again like this is not currently we we talk about like not one not two like really like hundreds of customers we seeing the same effect across different situations obviously the you know like some like they're different products and some of them sell like shorter Sal Cycles some of them have longer Sal Cycles some of them are easier to understand some of them are more hard to understand so I think obviously there like huge deviation in in this numbers uh but we we kind of we see like like the range of the data provided is is is like really 20 30% 40% sometimes in uh in in the Boost and conversion rates in in when it comes to Impressions and then when it comes to clicks or any other types of engagements we see two three four times increase um yeah so I think um did answer the full

question um see yeah just about um Predictive Analytics recommended next best best action for sales reps what measurable impact has this add a deal velocity and conversion rates yeah I think that covers yeah I think I just want to add that again like currently we talk about the reing engagements but we were to provide more signals so I think U and again like every time we come up with a new signal obviously we won't understand what impact we'll have uh across different customers so as soon as we have the data we'll share with with our customers right um we do have one more question that we're actually going to answer offline um just for the sake of time we wanted to give everyone um a little bit of time back in their day thank you so much for coming today um as promised you can download the report by scanning this QR code that will give you you know some it's a really nice PDF that has good insights and analytics and a little bit

more about this uh data that we crunched and what we found in in those um in that uh again this will also be sent out with the recording so stay tuned for that and stay tuned for future product webinars this was the first of hopefully many that will be focused on a specific product or feature and uh so we will reach out about future webinars and again thank you all so much for coming today have a good rest of your day [music] [music]