Marketing and sales: bring all your ‘stars’ into alignment

The bleeding obvious

When a company has an integrated marketing strategy and sales strategy, this facilitates sales and marketing agreement on common goals, strategies and metrics. The benefits this alignment can bring a business are blatantly obvious.

If the sales and marketing teams work closely together, they’re able to share goals, technologies, processes and milestones that allow them to monitor and optimise the buying journey, from the first contact to a closed deal. Sharing means that communication between the two teams is free-flowing, and there are fewer impediments to reaching goals and revenue.

Yet in many businesses, the sales and marketing teams often have a difficult, sometimes prickly, relationship. Though both sides can appreciate the benefits of having a closely aligned relationship, the reality is far different. In fact, in many businesses, the difference between sales and marketing teams is pronounced, and the two work quite independently of each other. 

Communication and collaboration between the two teams don’t exist. This can be a huge impediment for growth, success and sustainability.

The seven deadly sins

1.   Doing nothing can be a big mistake

Turning a blind eye to a problem, denying there’s room for improvement, or merely accepting the status quo, can magnify issues that would be otherwise manageable. Many sales and marketing departments are working in their respective silos, often blissfully unaware of the need to adapt to the changing world around them. And many organisations have suffered for it. How did Kodak miss the digital-camera revolution? How did Canon not see the threat from smartphones with in-built cameras?

2.   Relying on quick fixes

When problems arise, like sales reps not meeting targets, many organisations look for quick fixes. However, these rarely work when it comes to sales and marketing collaboration. Typical quick fixes are:

• Provide more sales training: a popular solution, but according to German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, 87% of new knowledge is forgotten within 30 days. What happens 30 days after sales training?

• Hire more sales reps: the rationale for this popular choice is that if X number of reps bring in Y amount of revenue, more reps will bring in more. However, bringing more reps into a flawed sales and marketing environment won’t yield the desired results.

• Generate more sales leads: this would definitely boost sales results if all your sales lead creation and management processes were perfect. If sales and marketing were working harmoniously together to generate, nurture, hand over, close and report on leads perfectly. If not, why spend money creating more leads only to see them lead nowhere due to a flawed process?