Aligning Sales & Marketing and the Outputs They Deliver

The sales and marketing efforts need to be just that: sales AND marketing efforts aligned as one. The best marketing organizations collaborate with their sales counterparts to jointly create initiatives, lead generation, and mutually supported plans to help the sales organization present the company's unique value propositions to the right audiences in the right always. Marketing's focus on collateral, websites, and promotional campaigns that don't bring the sales group into the conversation miss on so many levels.

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) underscores this concept in their work on The Challenger Sale. As the sales leader responsible for implementing Challenger Selling at a company where I worked a few years ago, I learned firsthand from CEB that most companies begin the process by working with the sales group and bring in the marketing group later. Whereas CEB's recommendation is to START with marketing and sales at the same time.

The point is further underscored in this article by Tracy Eiler, chief marketing officer at InsideView and author of Aligned to Achieve: How to Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth.

Historically, the marketing organization helped companies develop products, programs, and messaging to help the sales organization...and often worked in a silo ("we know best...we're the marketing group, right?"). Today, conventional wisdom helps us to see that only when marketing and sales work TOGETHER to create the message and value proposition is true benefit and scale achieved.

https://www.jeffwedge.com/aligning-sales-marketing-and-the-outputs-they-deliver/