Averting the Twin Towers disaster

No, I’m not talking about the World Trade Center, but rather about two mainstays of your organization--marketing and sales.

Marketers and salespeople have different mindsets. (see Sales or Marketing, who cares?) So it isn’t surprising that, even though they share the goal of acquiring and retaining customers, the two functions often exist in separate silos which interact poorly, if at all.

2008 research led by the CMO Council concluded that the strategic versus tactical approaches taken by the two disciplines tended to create divergent time frames, metrics, and vocabularies. “Salespeople consider up to 90% of the collateral materials created by marketing useless, and marketers deem nearly as much of the sales-created content as brand dilutive or downright inaccurate.”

In a 2008 survey of 506 sales and marketing professionals (“Closing the Gap: The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative”) 56% of respondents said their companies don’t have formal programs in place to unify sales and marketing functions. 30% said that their “marketing organization operates in a vacuum, crafting programs that do little to affect sales.”

Misalignment between these key parts of the organization often results in
· Misspent marketing funds
· Poorly exploited or wasted sales opportunities
· Inefficient lead generation and nurturing
· Poor customer profitability

Five ways to start creating alignment
1. Start by ensuring you have management buy-in for the effort; do not proceed without agreement from the Sales VP, Marketing VP, and CEO.
2. Obtain interdepartmental consensus on terms like ‘qualified lead,’ ‘profitable’ and ‘sale.’
3. Define each department’s responsibilities to the other. This should include Marketing’s role in lead generation, providing competitive analytics and defining points of differentiation and Sales’ commitment to identifying prospect wants and needs, accumulating prospect information, and reporting results. Some firms go as far as creating actual “contracts” to be signed by both functions.
4. Collaborate on setting goals and identifying metrics which allow you to measure success.
5. Create a system that allows sales and marketing to share prospect/customer data.

Your CMO has extensive experience with creating effective sales/marketing partnerships. If you’d like to fine-tune that relationship, give me a call!