You're struggling to align engineering and sales teams. How can you achieve shared business objectives?

Promote mutual understanding of responsibilities and challenges among teams. Engineers should be aware of the pressures that sales teams encounter, including quota targets and customer satisfaction, while sales professionals should understand the complexities and timelines involved in product development.

To align engineering and sales teams, focus on fostering open communication and mutual understanding. Start by organizing regular meetings where both teams can discuss goals, challenges, and customer feedback. Clearly define shared business objectives and emphasize how each team's success depends on collaboration. Encourage cross-functional projects to build trust and teamwork. Additionally, create metrics that track joint performance, rewarding collaboration that drives business outcomes. This approach helps bridge gaps, ensuring both teams work together toward common goals.

Yes, certainly identify the common goal (increase sales to specific industry, add features to help justify price increase, etc...) Then, bring the two teams together, and ask them each to present to group what they believe is needed to achieve the objective. Expect them each to perhaps focus on the other side somewhat. But this is good! Because then you as facilitator can blend their list of wants together and lead the ensuing discussions to establish a plan of attack to reach those goals, with appropriate combined efforts. Let each team know the definition of success for all the efforts requires the agreement of both groups, and ultimately the customer will decide if we did it right!

Establish objectives that require collaboration between both teams. This can include shared performance indicators or joint projects.

Maintain open and regular communication between teams. Use meetings, workshops, and collaboration tools to facilitate exchanges.

This is the most direct approach. But the sales team hates it. The engineers already have the customer’s solution. The sales team should be facilitating a conversation but they never do- because that does NOT feel like sales.