In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Kristina Finseth from Interseller as we discussed sales and marketing alignment for common growth goals and how to get 80%+ open rates on outreach email campaigns.

Kristina started out in recruitment for the first 5 years of her career before she entered the B2B SaaS space. She landed at Interseller in January which is a platform for prospecting and outreach for most recruiters. She sits on the fence between sales and marketing in what has become her role 'growth marketing' which will include both sales and demand generation for the sales team.

The misalignment of top-level goals is often the reason for the conflict between sales and marketing. So having the same goal of revenue means looking at every activity from a marketing point of view and through that lens will it get us any further towards our goals. It goes back to the old question of should marketing be measured purely on MQL's and no it shouldn't if those MQL's are only successful 2% of the time.

If you are working with a leadership team who haven't previously been heavily involved in the marketing strategy, it's part of your job to get the buy-in for why you want to do something step-by-step to share that vision.

It helps a marketer to have worked with the sales team. Kristina has worked on the team understands their goals, understands their pain points so it's really a people relation problem when sales and marketing don't align. Getting to know each other on a personal level massively helps close the gap.

Everyone thinks they are a marketer, so often sales will come to the marketing team with 100 ideas but making sure the sale team are heard without saying directly no and offending them is important to establish early on.