There continues to be a Grand Canyon like gorge between Sales and Marketing organizations. They work from different perspectives and most often the only collaboration that occurs is at an annual planning / strategy meeting (and even this is unusual). What is absolutely obvious is that they need to be more communicative, collaborative on a real-time basis, especially in the technology fields. With the rapid development and obsolescence cycles the technology industry experiences, anything other than real-time is going to kill any potential of alignment.
Then the question reverts to ... "aligned on what?" I hate to sound like a broken record (or CD for today's generation) but a sale happens because of a relationship between people. Marketing and Sales must be aligned, real-time on creating messaging that solves a specific issue for a specific vertical for a specific PERSON/ROLE. And the feedback as to how successfully that is occurring must be real-time and collaborative so that adjustments can be made on the fly.
This article from CRM Guru website, written by Scott Santucci, is dead on. This is an issue that CRM applications were not, and are not, designed for, or ever intended to resolve, but that they have been unrightly criticized for:
The Sales and Marketing Divide -
What has been missing is the capability to work from a common base of knowledge. This is the divide that we have bridged with our Executive Link application.
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