In a recent Harvard Business Review there was a piece that I just had to share. Mainly because this is both an age old problem but also still so common today but can be resolved. It talks about a Fortune 250 B2B company who spent a quarter of a million dollars trying to solve the wrong problem.
The article outlines the facts that this organisation threw millions at both problems, thinking it was the product line or lack of effort from sales. They finally realised what the real issue was – misaligned goals between marketing and sales.
As they clearly state this company isn’t alone. From my personal experience, and from our work through The Amplified Group, we have come across this often. That marketing and sales departments often set their strategies, and goals, separately from each other.
Harvard’s research on B2B sales management found that in particular, a common problem is lack of alignment. No surprise there to most I guess! When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, both suffer.
However, it goes beyond this in my opinion. Consider if you could align strategies, goals and avoid silos basically aligning marketing & sales but as a united team.
Imagine the impact on the end goal. Working together as one team towards a common goal with a common purpose, this must be the perfect storm surely?
But first you need to have the proof points. Turn opinion of where the challenges are into fact, uncover the cracks as such, assess the real situation. This doesn’t mean finding someone to blame but pinpointing areas to focus your alignment efforts on.
If Harvard have uncovered the ‘why’ we believe we can help with the ‘how’ to solve it with two simple steps:
- Test out your theory. Is there really an alignment problem? Assess both your sales and marketing teams alignment status.
- Think about adopting a methodology that can be applied to the challenge. How to unite sales and marketing. How to align those goals and importantly, those individuals.
- If you want to avoiding trying to solve the wrong problem, in our view, nothing you will spend your money on this year will be more productive.
