Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript from the Norwest Nowcast above where Operating Executive Renée Cohen shares the three most impactful tips she has been sharing with marketing leaders in the Norwest portfolio.

After three months in the marketing operating executive role at Norwest, here are three tips I found myself sharing more than once with Norwest portfolio companies. (And by the way, these enterprise marketing tips are applicable to both early and later-stage companies.)

First tip: investing in RevOps and marketing ops will improve your pipeline efficiency.

Does any of this sound familiar?

• Your teams disagree on the definition of an MQL. So, for example, your marketing team is sending leads to sales and sales has no idea why they’re getting them and they don’t think that the leads are any good.
• Or maybe your marketing org has no way of measuring in the aggregate what percentage of leads are being accepted by your SDR and your AEs.
• Or maybe your sales team is developing their target account list in a silo, and they’re not being given data that shows an account heatmap to measure things like firmographic information of the account and previous engagement within that account.

These are all often symptoms that your marketing and your sales teams’ efforts could be better integrated. And RevOps can help with that. So where do you start? You can start with mapping the entire lead lifecycle, and the lead criteria from first touch and awareness through to a closed deal. And then you map what data needs to be passed along to each team along the way so that each function can work more efficiently to produce better outcomes and progressing leads through the funnel.

Second tip: ABM is probably right for you if you’re an enterprise marketer, but don’t buy the technology just yet.

Before you purchase an ABM platform, you can document your strategy and you can get started without adding another piece of tech.

So, for starters, you can get really clear on your ideal customer profile and make sure that your demand gen, your SDR teams, and your AEs all understand who that ICP is and agree to it. And you can build your target account list from there.

Then you can align on your KPIs. Why are you doing ABM? It could be to improve velocity through your sales funnel. So maybe you want to accelerate how quickly deals close and shorten that window. Or maybe you want to increase the number of the percentage of deals that are closed-won. Or maybe you need to improve the number of net new logos that are coming into your pipeline. So, whatever those KPIs are, that’s going to help you with developing your plan to prosecute into those accounts.

And when you develop that plan, you need to do it hand in hand with your sales team. And you can start to operationalize all of this in your CRM without buying any new technology to start with.

And third: don’t underestimate the power of marketing and SDR alignment.

I’m going to end here on a little story. One of our portfolio companies saw a 50 percent month-over-month lift in new sales-qualified meetings during the month of August. And if you have been around the block with demand gen for a while, you know that August is typically a really slow month – usually the second slowest month of the year outside of December. And how did they do this?

They did this with the marketing team working really closely with the SDR team and surfacing warm accounts to the SDRs during their campaigns and then working with the SDRs on the outreach messaging to those accounts. So, it’s never a bad idea to coordinate your demand gen and your SDR teams’ efforts and I promise you it will always result in better outcomes.

So if any of this sounds familiar, tell me what you think in the comments and I look forward to hearing from you.