10 Tips to Overcome the Sales and Marketing Alignment Dilemma – Part 1

The importance of Sales and Marketing alignment

The role of a Channel Marketing Manager is tough as they need to be experts in many areas.

Firstly, they need to able to produce material to motivate and educate their distributors that have different business models.

Secondly, they need to be able to produce material to motivate, educate and support their resellers who also address different segments of the market in different ways, and, Thirdly they need to understand the varying buying cycles and requirements of the end user.

In my current field of Sales Training and Marketing coach and trainer a common theme arises more often than not and is called Sales and Marketing alignment. In order to offer my 10 important steps to align sales and marketing we must look at the symptoms.

Symptoms

• “We have a room full of marketing material and sales have not done their job in distributing the material to their customers.”

• “Sales staff should stick to their job and stop telling Marketing what to do.”

• “Distributors supply credit they do not generate sales.”

• “That’s a sales function.”

• “Trade events are not successful as sales do not follow up”

With these symptoms in mind, here are the first 5 of 10 Tips

1. Sales and marketing should be on the same team and efforts of both need to be aligned. So start with both Heads of Sales and Marketing having the same Revenue and Profit Target

2. Create a role of Sales and Marketing Director to better align both teams (as long as the Candidate has the required expertise. Being a good at Sales doesn’t make you good at Marketing, and vice versa)

3. Marketers do not rely on a brief from sales to understand the customer. Both sales and marketing teams must understand the sales process starting from distributor to the end-user buying habits.

4. Do not rely only on industry publications. How often does your Marketing team actually meet with your top ten partners, in their offices, to better understand how they can add value to their business through your marketing efforts? Is it enough?

5. Marketing must present to the sales team their strategic plans and marketing calendar outlining their key activities, and then agreement needs to be met on what will work and add value, and then most importantly articulate the strategy and support required from sales.

For Tips 6 – 10 please check out next week’s blog