Sales & Marketing Alignment: Building a Practical Bridge

The natural tension between sales and marketing is not going to simply disappear. Marketing needs visibility into sales communications and influence on those communications. The field needs content and tools that are truly “conversation ready.” Organizational silos must be broken to deliver customers the information they need, when they need it. 

Marketing leaders are embracing the mandate for bridging this divide and driving sales enablement. The ideal outcome is connecting strategy and branding to sales messaging while ensuring compelling conversations are happening every day with customers. 

A practical bridge that can be embraced by sales and marketing is the customer buying process and anticipating buyer conversations. It is valuable because it enables sales and marketing to collaborate on 4 questions. Who in the customer organization are we engaging? When are we engaging? What is the purpose of that conversation? And how will sales lead that conversation?

Starting this journey involves a few critical steps that begin with mapping your buying conversations, defining content and tool requirement, and building out that content with a cross-functional team of stakeholders. 

Finally, the buying conversation mapping exercise will quickly lead to something practical. And be prepared for requirements to emerge that you may not have expected.

(This is the last blog in a series on bridging the divide between sales & marketing. If you are interested in the full conversation, read What Bridges the Divide?, Using the Customer Buying Process, and Buying Conversation Examples)