There’s always been a gap between sales and marketing, you just have to accept they’re different disciplines, skill-sets and power-bases in an organisation. But sales close deals at the end of the day and this is valued way above marketing when it really comes to it.
One way to look at it is to change the mindset from the very foundations of this issue. It is not how we align sales and marketing. It is how marketing aligns with sales!
Aligning with sales doesn’t mean:
- Delivering event support and funding for industry or customer events
- Creating speculative high-cost videos and presentations for client meetings
- Devising lead generation or ABM programmes to deliver pipeline sales won’t action
Aligning with sales does mean:
- In-depth collaborative planning and targeting – True inclusive and constant joint planning where sales identifies exactly the propositions and targets it requires marketing to focus on and engage with
- Inclusion of sales insight in everything – Approaching the development of any related marketing campaigns, messaging, communications, contents and assets to include sales, ensuring their insight is built-in from the start and throughout not as a later compromising addition
This will seem to many like marketing is simply giving greater power to sales, but the gap between sales and marketing alignment continues to be raised as a key way to improve marketing results. So, it’s time to try a different solution to a repeating problem.
In reality what adopting this approach does is give marketing greater control, as it gives marketing access to better insight and information. Marketing are still the experts when it comes to:
- Understanding how to reach people and cut through the noise
- Change perception and trigger an interest that leads to the sales conversation
- Engineering the story that takes a lead from to purchase and beyond
We work extensively in challenging projects, and one of the simple things we do is engage sales upfront in our process and throughout it – its why our projects deliver a result that is long-term and sales-ready – find out more by giving us a call.
