Sales and Marketing Alignment: Why are Most Organizations Dysfunctional?

I’m a big advocate for sales and marketing alignment — far too often I see sales and marketing organizations that don’t even pay attention to each other. They both waste a lot of time on the top of the funnel. Marketing thinks they are driving sales ready leads with tradeshows, list buying, print advertising, outsourced cold calling, etc. Sales thinks they creating new sales opportunities with their cold calling efforts into prospective target accounts. Most of the time — both marketing and sales are spinning their wheels.

That presents a pretty big question?

How do we move to a better framework that consistently drives sales ready leads to sales reps, nurtures leads that are not ready to buy soon, and ties closed won deals back to the initial marketing event that created the opportunity?

You shift your mindset and decide to learn about sales and marketing alignment. Then you take action. I also believe you start to add to the demand generation equation a healthy serving of inbound marketing to complement your outbound marketing activities.

Here is a great quote from the HubSpot blog:

“There are three specific ways Inbound Marketing improves on the efficiency of traditional marketing:

(1) It Costs Less – Outbound marketing means spending money – either by buying ads, buying email lists or renting huge booths at trade shows. Inbound Marketing means creating content and talking about it. A blog costs nothing to start. A Twitter account is free, too. Both can draw thousands of customers to your site. The marketing ROI from inbound campaigns is higher.

(2) Better Targeting – Techniques like cold-calling, mass mail and email campaigns are notoriously poorly targeted. You’re reaching out to individuals because of one or two attributes in a database. When you do Inbound Marketing, you only approach people who self-qualify themselves. They demonstrate an interest in your content, so they are likely to be interested in your product.

(3) It’s an Investment, Not an Ongoing Expense – When you buy pay-per-click advertising on search engines, its value is gone as soon as you pay for it. In order to maintain a position at the top of Google’s paid results, you have to keep paying. However, if you invest that money in quality content that ranks in Google’s organic results, you’ll be there until somebody displaces you.

For the full blog post click here.

Sales and Marketing organizations need to be on the same page yesterday. Organizations that operate from this framework have a competitive advantage and will outsell you at a lower cost per lead if you don’t adapt.

It is Darwinism for the business world at its finest.

Will you adapt?

Related posts:

1. Demand Generation and Inbound Marketing – Is There Really a Difference?
2. Sales and Marketing Alignment: A How to Guide
3. Inbound Marketing, Outbound Marketing and Sales – Are You Herding Cattle or Cats?
4. Why is the Social Graph Vital to B2B Sales Organizations?
5. Cut Your Marketing Budget to Zero & Still Generate Leads