How an Award-winning Sales and Marketing alignment looks like
Success in B2B-tech demand generation doesn’t come by itself. It requires entrepreneurship and leadership — especially within global, complex environments changing fast. In 2021, I was privileged to be part of a Forrester EMEA ABM Award winning team at Unit4. The learnings still stand.
The dead end street
Unit4 was in a dead-end street situation. Marketing was focused on generating leads — mostly people who raised their hand to download marketing papers. The expectation was that these leads were great angles for sales and business development to act on and build their pipeline in an early stage, talking about value. At the time, Marketing was developing more business-value related content instead of only talking product features. The reality was that because of focusing on business-value messaging, these hand-raisers were exploring and learning — not interested in buying. Handing these leads over to sales was the dead-end street.
Sales generated their own business and ignored the marketing noise. Marketing was focused on leads, sales on opportunities. No shared KPI. A huge mismatch.
At that time, I was leading digital marketing, and over the years we built a tech stack that supported sales and marketing in running a very effective demand generation process.
But the real magic happened when our Marketing and Sales leaders joined forces and adjusted the way of working between marketing and sales. This unlocked the potential of our technical setup. It was a success from the start, and resulted in winning the Forrester EMEA ABM Award for our scalable, dynamic ABM program in 2021 — with conversion rates across target accounts increasing by 10%.
Sales and Marketing talking is not enough
The marketing and sales alignment happened between two leaders. One responsible for global marketing, and one responsible for global demand generation on the sales side. Two teams that decided to share one KPI. Two people who trusted each other and really joined forces. They wanted to stop looking at noise (leads) and focus on building opportunities together. The only way to increase demand. And to bring back the smile on faces.
They decided together on who to go after — the sweet-spot accounts, the personas, their challenges and ambitions. But also what proof and help to offer them along their journey.
The tech stack was able to track buying signals: third-party account intent, activity on your website, emails, and brochures. But also CRM activity and notes. This data was organized and transformed into something actionable — not just showing account activity. Today we can use AI to take this even a step further. It’s about combining data from dark-funnel activity with activity from people in your systems, matched to persona group, interest area, ambition, and buying stage. At Unit4, we used a ‘pepper rating’ to show the hotness of an account. A simple traffic light can do the overarching trick as well. Red = action now, Orange = check it out, Green = leave as is.
The Unit4 setup resulted in the right timing of messages, and the ability to personalize at scale. Target audiences were organized as dynamic groups based on criteria like ambition, persona, stage, and industry. The more you filter, the more relevant your ads and emails become. Dynamic target audiences mean that relevance updates automatically as behavior changes. The moment interest drops, the account is automatically removed from the high-interest audience. Email programs and advertising platforms can all use these dynamic audiences.
An integrated setup at Unit4 also meant CRM insights were always up to date, so sales initiatives stayed aligned with the current account status. Two teams, one message.
Using intent data, a conversion by filling in a form is not a necessary step to win an opportunity. When an account shows a ‘red light’, you take the initiative anyway.
Working on opportunities by marketing — a new role was introduced
At Unit4, we took this to the next level. On the marketing side, we created a new role: Account Developer. This person actively developed the red-light accounts — adding all stakeholders into CRM, creating the opportunity for handing over to business development on the sales side. This opportunity qualification process (go, no-go) happened in a weekly alignment meeting between the sales and marketing leader.
This weekly alignment was also about making the setup better. Why is a marketing-qualified lead accepted or not accepted to move over to sales? What messaging works, what is out of context, where should we accelerate, and what to pause? It’s adjusting the buttons based on direct sales feedback.
Demand generation is shifting towards AI Search
While the places where people gather information are changing, the Unit4 success ingredients still stand for success in demand generation today. AI Search does have its consequences for the tech layer — because fewer people are visiting websites to get information. Visibility on AI Search platforms is a key focus area for me at SUSE currently. We optimize our content to win the visibility battle at the topic level. It has changed the way we look at content creation and publication. Less volume, more structure. We also see a content gap growing on our website. We are serving LLMs and real visitors. LLMs need a lot of tofu content, while real visitors are looking for content as confirmation and a next step. Still figuring out the best solution to cover this.
Change is there, but the basics for success in demand generation stay the same. To help other businesses I created the Revenue Motion Framework™. In five phases it helps drive opportunity value to the organization as a replacement for generating leads (noise).