Sales & Marketing Alignment: What Bridges the Divide?
Alignment between sales and marketing – elusive, but many organizations are successfully bridging the divide.
We often hear comments from marketing leaders, such as:
“We don’t know for sure what salespeople are actually showing customers.”
“We don’t know whether sales people are actually using the corporate deck.”
“We see sales presentations and cringe.”
“We waste time producing materials that get ignored.”
We also hear comments from salespeople, such as:
“The content marketing gives us is too generic.”
“The content marketing gives us is too high level.”
“The focus should be more on the value of the solution and less on the product.” “
We can’t locate the right content for our next meeting.”
“We waste too much time creating our own content.”
According to Forrester, sales and marketing leaders will “need to break down the walls between organizational silos to get customers the information they need.” How do executives face the challenge of breaking down the walls and bridging the divide? Many have tried and grown cynical, others have made initial progress that has stalled. And others have experienced tremendous success.
WHAT BRIDGES THE DIVIDE?
At its core, ‘the divide’ is all about sales enablement and how the marketing process can enable the selling process. Executives need a bridge that sales and marketing can both embrace, and that is the customer buying process. At the highest level, it’s a series of buying conversations that can be anticipated in any sales cycle. Sales enablement then focuses exclusively on answering 4 fundamental questions: Who? When? What? How?
We will look more closely at these 4 questions and discuss how the buying process can help bridge the divide between sales and marketing in our next blog post.
