Seven Ways to Know If

Your Sales and Marketing Objectives Need Alignment

by Chris Pareja, Associate Partner

When your car’s alignment is out of whack, it can be physically difficult to keep your car pointed straight at its target destination. Misalignment of marketing and sales objectives can have the same impact on your business.

Unfortunately, companies of all sizes suffer from a misalignment of marketing and sales objectives. Sales and marketing alignment is an essential area to address as you introduce and socialize marketing operations throughout your organization.

Here are seven symptoms that it’s time to look into marketing and sales alignment:

1. Sales accuses marketing of producing low-quality leads. Often, the marketing team is accused of generating “useless” leads at tradeshows or through marketing initiatives. The sales team may claim the contact information being collected belongs to low-level members of prospect or non-prospect organizations.
2. Marketing accuses sales of letting perfectly good leads go to waste. The flip side of symptom #1 occurs when marketing is throwing leads over the fence to the sales team, and sales pays no attention to the leads or only cherry-picks the hottest leads, leaving the rest to wither on the vine.
3. The teams have not jointly discussed and defined the sales process. There is huge value in having the marketing team gain a thorough understanding of the sales process. Working collaboratively, barriers can be identified and removed by a joint marketing and sales attack.
4. The teams have not jointly discussed and defined the customer ’s buying process. The client almost never buys according to the sales process you have internally designed for them to follow. They have their own process, which may include web searches, requests for proposals, sign-off from senior management or other steps which may or may not be apparent to your teams. A mistimed marketing campaign could unnecessarily lengthen the clients’ buying cycle. However, if the message and timing is right, the cycle could be reduced dramatically.
5. Marketing hasn’t received the full prospect list.  Knowing which decision makers are in the room during a sales call can be very valuable information for the marketing team. For example, if marketing has only been targeting technical decision makers, but hasn’t developed messaging or tools to address the needs of CEOs or CFOs who are also part of a big-ticket IT product sale, sales cycles could be derailed prematurely.
6. Sales spends more time creating their own “marketing materials” than they do selling. Symptom #5 often causes #6. Sales teams who don’t feel like they get proper support from marketing can often be found cutting up and reassembling brochures, creating their own email campaigns or generating presentations that may be unrelated to the direction or brand marketing has chosen to pursue.
7. The marketing engine is producing leads the sales team is incapable of closing. One of the most disheartening and expensive symptoms of misalignment is the generation of large volumes of high-quality leads the sales team can’t close due to bandwidth, skill set, product availability or other issues.

Look for the seven symptoms at your next marketing and sales meeting. And if more than half show up, it may be time for realignment. The good news is all of these symptoms can be solved with one word: COMMUNICATION.

An open dialog between sales and marketing doesn’t just prevent wasting marketing dollars while shrinking sales cycles. The dialog also makes it easier to steer your business toward your revenue objectives.

Chris Pareja is a marketing consultant utilizing more than 13 years of marketing, sales and management experience to help clients break down barriers in their sales process while increasing marketing measurability.