Are Your Sales and Marketing Aligned?

By Colly Graham, www.salesxcellence.co.uk

How many businesses have their sales and marketing aligned? Are your sales and marketing aligned?

A hundred years ago the term marketing was unfamiliar. Sales were the only game in town and it incorporated everything we now call marketing. The Chartered Institute of Marketing was originally called The Incorporated Sales Managers’ Association. Marketing as a discipline has its roots in sales. Over time, with the new science of marketing, sales and marketing became estranged.

Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy said in a Harvard whitepaper entitled ‘Ending the War Between Marketing and Sales,’ “Salespeople accuse marketers of being out of touch with what customers really want or setting prices too high. Marketers insist that salespeople focus too myopically on individual customers and short-term sales at the expense of longer-term profits. Result? Poor coordination between the two teams – which only raises market-entry costs, lengthens sales cycles and increases the cost of sales”.

In changing times it is forecasted that in ten years from now there will be no such thing as separate marketing and sales departments. There will be one team comprising two interdependent disciplines. However, when we look at our local business schools, do we see a mention of ‘Sales’ on the curriculum?

When you bring sales and marketing together your company will experience rapid improvement in sales productivity. The quantity and quality of leads improve, sales cycles grow shorter and conversion rates increase. Your business will grow faster and generate more profit.

• Identify customer goals or problems.
• Link your product or service to the capability to solve their problems and achieve their goals
• Help customers envision how they would use those capabilities to
  achieve their goals and solve their problems.

From the perspective of the sales force, one major problem is that most marketing materials stress functions, features, and benefits, things that say what the product will do for the prospective customer. Typical materials include claims that a product or service will reduce expenses, save time or improve productivity.

By leading with features, functions and benefits on a sales call, the sales professional leaves it to the customer to envision how to use the product or service. That’s a leap that many customers cannot or will not make on their own.

While prospective customers certainly need to understand features and benefits, the fundamental questions leading to closing a sale relate to how the product or service will help prospects:-

How can marketing create sales-ready messaging which the sales team can use to help prospective customers build a vision and shorten sales cycles and close more sales?

These are the steps you can take to achieve this:

• Study the potential buyer’s roles and goals. Identify the decision maker in the target company who have the power to buy, fund and implement the seller’s offering.
• Determine each of these executives’ business goals and objectives within the organisation. What are their missions? What are the obstacles to achieving those goals?
• Consider how your company’s products or services can help each customer achieve the goal, solve the problem or satisfy the need.
• Develop a set of targeted questions that will lead the prospect through the process of identifying one or more goals, problems or needs.
• Develop various scenarios that will help salespeople guide the prospects to an understanding of how they or others within the company can use your product or service to satisfy that problem or need.
• Carry the message throughout the marketing mix, from the company Web site through brochures, sales sheets, and media relations.

• Study the potential buyer’s roles and goals. Identify the decision maker in the target company who have the power to buy, fund and implement the seller’s offering.
• Determine each of these executives’ business goals and objectives within the organisation. What are their missions? What are the obstacles to achieving those goals?
• Consider how your company’s products or services can help each customer achieve the goal, solve the problem or satisfy the need.
• Develop a set of targeted questions that will lead the prospect through the process of identifying one or more goals, problems or needs.
• Develop various scenarios that will help salespeople guide the prospects to an understanding of how they or others within the company can use your product or service to satisfy that problem or need.
• Carry the message throughout the marketing mix, from the company Web site through brochures, sales sheets, and media relations.

By following this process, marketing can give sales professionals the tools they need to influence and steer sales calls to their advantage.

Colly Graham,