Marketing and Sales Unite: Effective Alignment & Collaboration

Smart Sales and Marketing Unite: Alignment

Getting Sales and Marketing departments in the same room, playing nice, getting along, and cooperating, is definitely a step in the right direction. However, the cold reality is that this is NOT effective alignment or collaboration:

1/ harmony is not teamwork,

2/ cordial co-operation is not collaboration,

3/ passing leads between Marketing and Sales is not alignment, and

4/ these types of meetings do not help everyone meet their prevailing job goals.

Smart Sales and Marketing teams are working in collaboration. They recognize they cannot function effectively without the other working in concert with them.

So what are smart businesses doing, based upon published research and customer case studies?

• Sales and Marketing alignment involves many things including shared goals, common milestones and metrics, well-oiled business processes, and smart technology investments. The Marketing and Sales teams agree to a common objective that will result in each department achieving their functional and personal goals.

• They focus their combined skills and energy to move potential leads, cost-effectively through the buyer’s purchasing process, to become a happy customer.  It begins by measuring what percentage of Marketing-generated leads actually become a Sales Lead as part of the official Sales Pipeline report, that actually become Sales Opportunities as part of the official Sales Forecast report, and that actually become a Closed deal as part of the Sales Win/Loss report.

However, this alignment and sharing of a common objective cannot occur without understanding the difference between Sales and Marketing Strategies.

Sales Strategy is how the business organizes its sales efforts across the value chain to go to market, who you are going to sell to and how to create real value within the given market place with your customers. Sales is about one-to-one where the business becomes real for the client. Sales develops relationships and looks after individuals. Sales deals with the ambiguities and analyses the behavior of the prospects and customers with whom they deal with on an individual basis. Sales professionals talk to their customers about effective offerings that help them realize their goals and objectives. Sales moves away from discussing price and discount, instead replacing these with discussions about total cost of ownership which includes price but extends to include deliveries, warranties, support, training and the other contributing things that are delivered as part of the purchase.

Marketing Strategy is how the business tells the stories (company, product, etc.) to many people. Marketing talks to groups and looks after the brand’s reputation and keeps the stories circulating and resonating with the target markets using the company’s plumb line (the business of the business) as its central reference. Marketing analyses the big data and brings the average result not the specifics. Marketing studies what experience customers expect when they buy or try a product, service or solution. That means reading their digital footprint and understanding their on-line chatter as much as it does focus group discussions. Marketing should not promote special prices/discounts, instead replace these with special offers focusing on delivering real value.

When Sales and Marketing teams build effective strategies that are aligned, share common goals and communication is open and flowing then the results are outstanding

The results:

• Marketing can claim that they directly contributed “40% +“ of the company’s total new business revenue (with improved Marketing ROI),
• Sales can claim that they increased closed Sales revenue by “30%+” (with increased sales per headcount).
• The CEO can demonstrate that they grew revenue “20%+” faster (with better profitability) than their peers, simply due to having better organisational alignment between Sales and Marketing.

Imagine what could happen if a company went beyond basic alignment to become fully strategically aligned? Went beyond basic collaboration to empowered collaboration?

Smart companies do not accept or tolerate silos or war-like behaviorr between Sales and Marketing. That is not the way of the future. Instead, smart companies expect unity, empowered collaboration, role clarity underpinned by strategic alignment, working towards a common purpose.  For additional insight please read CEO Leadership Required to Accelerate Revenue Growth.

Their aim by uniting sales and marketing is to become an unbeatable powerhouse.  Will that be your company or your competitor?

(This article was also included in the Barrett Sales Trends 2016 Report and published on LinkedIn)