TL;DR: Sales Ops (SOPs) and Marketing Ops (MOPs) teams often work in silos with overlapping skill sets but lack clarity and cohesion in their processes and tools. To bridge gaps and align their efforts, businesses need to focus on initiatives like tech stack mapping, establishing common definitions, and promoting continuous communication between these teams.
The disconnect between SOPs and MOPs: Sales Ops and Marketing Ops teams share comparable skill sets, but they often lack clarity into each others’ tools, processes, and perspectives. Businesses tend to separate Sales and Marketing expertise into distinct role profiles—even when they’re both mutually accountable to a VP of Revenue or CRO under RevOps, formal team structure doesn’t always accurately reflect the level of insight that Sales Ops and Marketing Ops people share into one another’s work.
The problem with most handovers: Wherever there’s a handover between Sales and Marketing, SOPs and MOPs will impact each other through how they approach technology at a strategic level and how they use systems on a procedural basis. So when interaction and understanding between these teams are limited, leaders run a high risk of infrastructure that breaks, numbers that don’t add up, and decisions that can’t reliably create revenue.
What’s in this article for you? In this Tough Talks Made Easy, we’ll help you explain to leadership how disconnection between SOPs and MOPs manifests in each others’ tech stacks, the impact that arises, and how to improve cohesiveness between the two teams. You’ll learn:
➡️ Common causes for SOPs and MOPs disconnect
➡️ Consequences of poor handover practices
➡️ Strategies for bridging gaps between SOPs and MOPs
Stacks in siloes
Sales and Marketing complement each other in their shared aim of generating revenue. Naturally, the choices that SOPs and MOPs make with their tech stacks and process structures have downstream impacts on the other team.
For example: SOPs uses a data enrichment tool to add external information to lead records. Based on this data, Marketing creates nurture campaigns to target particular segments of your audience.
What if MOPs also uses a data enrichment tool for the same purpose?
At best, it’s redundant—bloated costs of tool ownership and increased overhead. The tools that SOPs and MOPs have chosen could require a configuration or have some interaction with other solutions that disrupt how their counterparts work.
Sales and Marketing bring different findings to the table.
Data integrity’s also a significant issue. Each tool might populate data categories uniquely (e.g. country codes vs. names) or produce inconsistent information (e.g. different job titles for the same person). And if SOPs and MOPs each refer to a separate database, they lack a source of truth to confirm the veracity of the data.
With inconsistent data structures and terminology definitions, SOPs and MOPs run into trouble. Data doesn’t flow between the teams as it should, nor is it conducive to the kind of analysis and reporting that guides better decisions.
The likely outcome: Sales and Marketing bring different findings to the table. People become defensive about their data and processes, yet no one can make a confident call about which customer segments to prioritize or what your revenue projections are for the next quarter—because you can’t trust the numbers.
Bridging the gaps
To get tools, data, and processes in sync, SOPs and MOPs need to work from the same knowledge base, with open communication about how things work and what they mean. Here are some initiatives your leaders should encourage to achieve this:
- Tech stack mapping: Create a visual representation of how all the tools your business uses fit together. You want to convey how all the pieces in your stack interact with others, what functions they perform, and who uses them to do what. This likely means speaking to people in different teams around the company to get their perspectives. You’ll gain a resource that exposes any redundant or problematic pieces and spells out what tools are available to fulfill different needs. This lets your SOPs and MOPs teams cut costs and consolidate their stacks.
- Common definitions: Bring SOPs and MOPs together to define and document how they’ll categorize fields, what different data points and common acronyms mean, and what constitutes a lead qualification. These definitions can evolve over time and the lines blur further when doing business with external partners who have their own interpretations, so collaborating on a definition list keeps both teams clear. Similarly, a central repository of data which SOPs and MOPs use for reporting will provide a consistent basis for data analysis.
- Continuous communication: Encourage people in Sales and Marketing to build relationships with their counterparts. Culturally, people should feel comfortable proactively reaching out to others at the onset of projects to clarify accountabilities, share knowledge, and offer strategic input.
Sales and Marketing can be great individually, but when misaligned, the cracks will show to customers. Bringing SOPs and MOPs together encourages clean data, purposeful use of technology, clear communication, and consistent processes—essential to spend wisely, collaborate well, and take strategic decisions with the confidence and insight to drive your business forward.
Get in touch for more guidance on aligning Sales and Marketing.
