10 Tips to Overcome the Sales and Marketing Strategy Alignment Dilemma – Part 2

The importance of Sales and Marketing alignment – part 2

In last week’s blog we discussed how Channel Marketing Managers, driving a Channel Marketing Strategy, need to be specialists in many areas.

They not only need to produce marketing collateral to motivate and educate their distributors, while supporting their resellers who are potentially in different segments of the market, they also need to consider the cyclical purchasing habits and requirements of the end user.

As a Sales and Marketing coach and sales training specialist I consistently drive the principle that Sales and Marketing alignment is crucial to ensure an organisation’s marketing budget generates an ROI and doesn’t disappear into a marketing ‘black hole’

In the modern digital age, most marketers have lost sight of simple methods that are essential to success

So following last week’s 1 – 5, here are Marketing Tips numbers 6 – 10

6. Obtain feedback from your sales team before producing marketing material. Ultimately they are the people who will have to take it out and discuss with customers (either in hard copy or on-line) and their input will make the marketing material more relevant. Plus, if sales feel past of the development process they will use it

7. As part of the planning process, schedule regular joint briefing sessions as part of your sales meetings so Sales and Marketing can articulate what is required from each person.

8. Promote the marketing department as an in-house marketing agency, who play on the same team and take responsibility for the Customers brief, as supplied by the sales people

9. As you would with an external marketing agency, if the brief is not good enough, send the sales people back to the market to gather more intelligence.

Sales people are the ones who are out there every day so should know more about customers requirements that office bound marketing

10. All employees are responsible for and play a part in the sales process of the business.

So whether you are building a brand or building a campaign to generate more leads and sales establish shared sales goals and metrics and reward their overall achievement.