Jul
26
Why All This Talk About Marketing-Sales Alignment?
There are quite a few articles out there that discuss various tactics and ways for marketing and sales to align and work better together. Let’s take a moment to step back and examine WHY this is so important. By understanding why it is important and what we can gain by truly aligning marketing and sales in the same process – the HOW should be easy.
I recently attended a fabulous marketing conference (shout out to Marketing Profs) at which I heard the same old statistic: the average B2B buyer (and probably B2C even more so) completes 57% of the buyer journey before engaging with a sales rep. However, I also heard a new perspective on this statistic. Because, yeah, we all know that, but what do we do about it?
Marketing is now responsible for that 57%.
(Shout out to @cahidalgo)
That is the fundamental shift behind the new efforts to align marketing and sales organizations. Whatever tactics you use – website, email, social, tradeshows, digital, online, offline, inbound, outbound – the shift is marketing has a 57% stake in getting and keeping customers engaged in the buying process.
The Marketing-Sales process is no longer a linear, one-directional process with a hand-off of a lead from marketing to sales. It is a non-linear, multi-directional, fluid process that is driven by the customer who doesn’t know where they are on a sales funnel diagram or that they have been identified as SQL in a database.
The bottom line: Marketing and Sales teams need to recognize we are part of the same continuum working together to bring in revenue. We may have different tactics and, often times, different objectives; but we need to be one team working together to achieve the same goal.
