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March 5, 2019
How Does the Marketing Leader Know If They Are Aligned to Sales?
By: Kyle Bushey
Misalignment between Marketing and Sales is most often one of the main reason’s companies miss the number. As a Marketing leader ask yourself the following two questions:
Download the Sales and Marketing Alignment Tool to leverage a simple checklist to evaluate if you are aligned with your sales counterparts, a scoring system to assess next steps based on your responses, and simple questions that you should be asking of you and your sales counterparts.
Are You Working With or Against Sales?
If you answered no to the first question. The answer to the second question is most likely the same, no. You are not alone in answering no to these questions. Misalignment between Marketing and Sales has been and continues to be a significant challenge for many businesses. The answer to start fixing this problem is not rocket science. It is two simple things, that are very challenging to execute.
Alignment and Clarity on How to Support One Another
The practices that you have in place are only as good as the alignment you have with sales and the rest of the business. You can have world class practices and teams in place to drive things such as: lead gen, ABM, field marketing, etc. but if they are not aligned to support sales. You are working against the business and not with it. How would you answer the following questions?
Often, we as marketing leaders think we know the answers to these questions. We tell ourselves we are aligned with sales. We are giving sales what they need. Sales is just not executing on it. However, if we take a step back from the daily grind and be honest with ourselves. We may not be as aligned as what we think.
Exercise Recommendation: Schedule a one-hour meeting with your sales counterpart. Write the above questions on a whiteboard. Spend 15 minutes answering them from your perspective. Then have your sales counterpart spend 15 minutes answering them from their perspective. The last 30 minutes should be spent on discussing the differences. There will be differences.
Open Communication and Feedback
We are in meetings with our sales counterparts weekly. We talk strategy with them. This is what marketing is focusing on. This is what sales is focusing on. This is what the company is focusing on. This is how we are each playing our part, etc. The conversations very rarely get into how we execute together. It never gets below 10,000 feet.
Ask yourself the following questions:
The communication we have with sales should be execution focused. How do we help execute together to drive growth? The recommended exercise above is a perfect example of how we should be communicating with our sales counterparts. The exercise gets below 10,000 feet and will help drive alignment on executing together. These kinds of execution discussions should be happening monthly if not bi-weekly.
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Download the Sales and Marketing Alignment Tool to leverage a simple checklist to evaluate if you are aligned with your sales counterparts, a scoring system to assess next steps based on your responses, and simple questions that you should be asking of you and your sales counterparts.
Additional Resources
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Kyle’s diverse background in sales, finance and entrepreneurship position him to understand the challenges that senior management face. His experience in account management, product launch and finance, allow him to provide strategic and tactical support across multiple levels and functions within an organization. Wile educated and trained in finance, Kyle spent multiple years in field sales and account management learning first hand how to hit his number. This deep understanding of sales and finance combined with SBI’s Revenue Growth Methodology brings immediate value to clients.
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