Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment to Generate Better Business Results

1 Historically sales and marketing have struggled to work well together. The disconnect between the two groups is so deeply ingrained that their arguments sound nearly cliché at this point. Sales organizations constantly complain about not getting enough leads from marketing and the ones they do get aren't ready to buy. And vice versa, marketing organizations argue that passing their leads to sales is the equivalent of putting them to a black hole with no visibility, feedback or measurable return on investment. In the past businesses were able to cope with the lack of alignment with varying degrees of success. Whether this meant passing around spreadsheets instead of using a central repository or generating reports at the end of each month or quarter instead of real-time information. But these methods no longer work in today's real-time, multi-channel, buyer-driven world. The hyper kinetic pace of the buyers' lives, coupled with significant shifts in the buying process make imperative greater alignment of sales and marketing with both each other and with their buyers goals, needs and wants. Poor communication is at the heart of the disconnect. It is tough to stay aligned when the sales and marketing leaders have different and potentially competing agendas. While the overarching goal of the business may be clear and straightforward – increase revenue through the sale of goods and services – the underlying strategy and execution plans developed by the supporting teams can take on different shapes and directions. This is especially true when sales and marketing leaders base their decisions on information from their individual departmental applications. In the case of these siloed systems, there is literally a wall between sales and marketing and it hampers both communication and strategic alignment. Different marketing and sales systems means there is limited visibility across the whole business process and decisions end up being made based on incomplete information. Instead of optimizing the end-to-end pipeline and maximizing potential revenue, sales and marketing hone in on what they can see and what they can measure, working toward different goals and unaware of what the other side is doing. Business that still throw leads over the wall from marketing to sales only to hear weeks or months later about the results are at a severe disadvantage in today's business environment. Marketing and sales need incentives to align their organizations around common goals. It's one thing to tell marketing and sales …