What can I do with a Marketing and Sales double major?

What are the best practices for setting goals for VP Marketing and VP Sales for a startup that has mainly been doing inbound marketing and inside sales that handles the leads generated?

• How are goals for VP Marketing set? Typically, I know that VP Sales has a revenue goal. Shouldn't VP Marketing have a revenue goal as well? For SaaS companies relying on inbound marketing, I'm just worried if VP Sales says marketing isn't working well, so he couldn't achieve the goal and/or VP Marketing debating that for all effort his team puts in, Sales take the commissions. Does this happen? How to resolve it?

• Answer:

  The VP of marketing should be held responsible for contributing/sourcing a defined amount of revenue to the company to help you meet the growth goals of your business, and looking at what percentage of that revenue should be sourced by marketing. To help define this number you can define your overall revenue growth goals and then work backwards through the funnel looking at the key transitions and conversion rates over the buying cycle such as: Opportunity -> customer Sales qualified lead (SQL) -> Opportunity Marketing qualified lead (MQL) -> Sales Qualified Lead Lead -> MQL Website visitor -> lead This should give you a clear idea of  exactly how many contacts need to be created at each stage of the funnel for your business to meet their growth goals. Beyond this you can then create accountability and alignment between the sales teams if each stage is clearly defined (ex: lead must have xyz criteria to be considered marketing qualified). Then marketing and sales teams are each clearly responsible for these transitions and managers and execs can clearly see when leads are getting stuck in or are leaving the funnel. This way marketing can then focus on which channels/tactics/buyer personas are going to allow them to most effectively generate the revenue number they are responsible for and sales can focus on closing the qualified leads they receive from marketing. I actually just wrote a blog post looking at this model further that you can read here: http://www.newbreedmarketing.com/blog/marketing/marketing-goals-calculator-template If it's helpful, you can also download an excel template I created that aligns with this model here: http://www.newbreedmarketing.com/marketing-goals-template Please feel free to reach out if you have any specific questions about any of this or want to discuss further.