Sales and Marketing - A Journey
It's been nearly 2 years since I wrote my series on Aligning, not enabling, Sales and Marketing to achieve better scale and growth ... here's what I learned.
Alignment is not easy ... particularly in smaller organizations, believe it or not. What I found is that the smaller the organization, the more "hats" people wear and the harder it is to keep team members "in their lane" and on-task. DO NOT MISTAKE ... for this to work we all need to work collaboratively, but we all must allow ourselves to focus on our part.
Where organizations succeeded is this collaboration we saw tremendous gains in conversion, retention and growth. These organization also came out of the alignment exercise with a better understanding of who THEY WERE and who THEIR CUSTOMER WAS ... like I said 2 years ago ... you CANNOT BE EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE.
It's funny though as a byproduct of these alignment exercises I helped organizations solve so much more than just "alignment" ... some of the surfaced challenges included:
And by working with organizations to remedy these issues, we further progressed the Sales & Marketing alignment initiatives and ensure we hit all 4 Pillars of Practice.
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Looking at your strategy holistically across these 4 Pillars, you will gain the flexibility and organization needed to build a true cross-functional strategy that is aligned and shares common goals.
In the end, True Sales & Marketing alignment is not a "Science". It's not an "Art" either. It's a combination of good practice, skill, knowledge, data and prediction. It requires focus, discipline and an organization-wide desire to take your business to the next level.
And it will create a mindset of continuous innovation and transformation that creates value, growth and is uniquely contagious.