Is Sales and Marketing Alignment Possible?
Are you ready to end the war between sales and marketing? How would you rate your sales and marketing team?
- Undefined (the groups act independently of one another)
- Defined (Some duplication of effort and functions))
- Integrated (the groups share structures, systems, and rewards)
In 2019, there are a lot of new trends and technologies that are affecting businesses. Now more than ever it is important that your marketing and sales teams are aligned. Multiple factors make it increasingly difficult for companies to crack into accounts and increase sales:
- Corporations are in a continual state of flux. Companies keep getting bigger and more global. Re-organizations, rightsizing and restructuring are everyday occurrences.
- Companies are running lean-and-mean. Everyone has way too much to do and way too little time to do it. Many marketers are overworked and stressed out. They spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings or putting out fires.
- Decision makers literally “haven’t got time for the pain.”Time is their most precious commodity; they protect it at all costs. Even if the status quo is less than desirable, they’ll stick with it as long as they can.
- Salespeople accuse marketers of being out of touch with what customers really want or creating products or marketing campaigns in a vacuum.
- Marketers insist that salespeople focus only on their views. Their main focus is all about short-term sales.
This outcome equals separation within the company and poor quality of results on both sides. How do you get your sales and marketing teams to start working together? Is sales and marketing alignment possible?
At ParkerWhite, we look at every project as an opportunity to synergistically align sales and marketing through frequent, cross-functional communication and mutual responsibility for creating positive outcomes. We balance the intelligence and real-time insights brought in by the field with corporate objectives for consistent branding and long-term growth.
Competition is more complex than ever. Compete on a more strategic level by using the newest technology and tools available to fully integrate your sales teams. We have created programs, environments, and feedback systems to have both sides sharing performance metrics and rewards. Those same systems can keep marketers more deeply involved in management and growth of key accounts.
When you can create the right synergistic relationship between sales and marketing, you will reduce interdepartmental bickering and enable both departments to boost top and bottom-line growth, together.
Carefully planned enhancements will bring salespeople’s intimate knowledge of your customers into the company’s core. These improvements will also help you serve customers better now and will help you build better products for the future.
They will help your company marry softer, relationship-building skills with harder, analytical skills. They will force your organization to closely consider how it rewards people and whether those reward systems apply fairly across functions.
Find out how we create sales and marketing bliss. Contact keith@parkerwhite.com, together we can bring systems, tools, and values to the frontline and end the feuding forever.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2010 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.