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.
Posts Tagged ‘sales marketing disconnect’
Why are Sales and Marketing Usually Unaligned?
There are three reasons why mis-alignment is present.
1. Top management doesn’t understand the full contribution that Marketing can make and should make to the business.
2. Marketers are not adequately trained to be true partners with Sales in the revenue generation process.
3. There isn’t an integrated planning process to enable (or force) Marketing and Sales to craft unified strategies and tactics.
Lead Generation is a Marathon, Marketing Automation Makes it a Sprint
In truth, Marketing Automation tool, significantly shortens the time between lead generation and lead closure, not because it facilitates lead nurturing and lead nurturing programs (using email tools), but because it recognizes the buying process as a group activity and hence takes into account all activities by an enterprise at different times before qualifying them as a ‘sales ready lead’.
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.
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…
