A while back I read Bill Stinnett’s excellent book, Think Like Your Customer, which should be required reading for anyone in Sales and Marketing, especially if you market high-value products and services. A glaring Marketing Operations disconnect for many companies is our tendency to over-focus on What and How we want to sell, when we really need [...]
Posts Tagged ‘sales and marketing alignment’
Beyond Marketing and Sales Alignment
Since every company is a system perfectly designed to produce the revenue it is producing if you want more revenue you have to change the system design. This means you have to tune the organizational effectiveness to support the sales process; you have to recognize that everyone affects sales results by the decisions they make daily and how effective they coordinate customer facing actions. Sales results are the scorecard for the entire company, not just the marketing organization. Revenue is a downstream measure of the organizational effectiveness upstream.
A Model for Aligning Sales and Marketing Processes
Sales and Marketing alignment is a complex issue involving culture, processes, politics and egos. All of this may seem daunting to an eager sales or marketing manager who simply wants to drive improved revenue results in their company by getting Sales and Marketing to collaborate more effectively.
Regardless of the complexity and obstacles, there is one relatively simple (but not entirely easy) step that companies should take immediately. This is to identify the stages of the buyer’s journey and align their sales and marketing processes to it.
Ending the Sales & Marketing Blame Game
Every company which has marketing and sales departments has at some point, witnessed the famous – sales and marketing fight and blame game – more commonly known as the sales and marketing mis-alignment. In a B2B set up these differences are more glaring as compared to a B2C company.In most B2B companies, the primary objective of marketing is to generate quality business Leads and of sales to convert these into closed deals. Both these departments are also measured based on the number of Leads generated and the number of sales closed, respectively.
In reality the role of marketing in a B2B company is relationship building and that of sales to use this relationship and help the prospect make a rational buying decision based on business value offered by the company’s solutions.
Irrespective of how companies want to position their marketing and sales objectives the truth is marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin.
Focus on Generating Opportunities not Leads
Lead Generation is thought to be key, to the survival of any B2B Company, a reason why B2B companies across the world, spend billions of precious dollars and resources on finding Leads – they buy, they capture, they generate, they do everything possible to keep their sales funnels’ filled with Leads. What is Lead generation? [...]
Why Sales is from Mars & Marketing from Venus???
At the recent IDC Directions 2010 conference – there was a lot of buzz about the Sales and Marketing disconnect in organizations and one of the phrases that caught my attention was – ‘Sales is from Mars and Marketing from Venus’.
I have discussed a couple of times on this blog, on how sales and marketing teams can come over their reservations and be more supportive of each other for the greater good of the organization.
Thinking deeper on this I realized that, maybe the title of John Gray’s book is not just a phrase to describe this divide but in some ways can help us understand the underlying reasons for this great divide as well.
The analysis presented in this post are my own observations, and any resemblance to any living species is purely intentional.
If we evaluate and compare the characteristics of these two teams with the main protagonists of Gray’s book – Men and Women, we will see some distinct similarities. Based on my analysis – I can safely say – Sales like Men are from Mars and Marketing like Women are from Venus…
