The battle between sales and marketing

The following blog is an excerpt from the white paper The Essential Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment. This white paper was written by Sqales and Brandsea marketing to promote our collaboration.

We will discuss the misalignment of sales and marketing, the vicious cycle internal teams face, and an introduction to the solutions.
For further reading, you can download our white paper.

Misalignment

Throughout the history of business, there is much to learn about internal collaborations. Every employee works hard on an important organizational goal and contributes to stimulating growth. But if one team is out of step with the rest of the company, it has immediate consequences: you miss out on leads, customers, or an opportunity to grow.

Marketing and sales teams, in particular, have repeatedly run into the same problem: misalignment. Facilitating a good connection between marketing and sales is often a complex process. Both teams work on their own islands and have different perspectives. Although both roles are vital to company growth, it can be difficult for salespeople to keep up with what marketers are doing and vice versa.

Marketing and sales departments have a figurative and sometimes even literal wall between them. As a marketeer, you toss your leads over the wall of your castle to sales without knowing what happens to them next. Sales gets a collection of leads that might be of little use, but do not bother to peek over the wall to see where these leads actually come from. Sound familiar?

The Vicious Cycle

One of the most common annoyances between marketing and sales is the following (slightly exaggerated) example: marketing is running around chasing leads as they try to ‘fill the funnel’ and sales believes that marketing does not make enough effort to provide good, qualified leads.

In fact, sales wonders what marketing contributes at all!

Marketing reacts by trying different tactics to find more “good” leads. Sales gets frustrated because they are spending time talking to “bad” leads, which negatively affects their close ratios. Marketing continues to be frustrated and accuses sales of not empathizing with the persona and the purchasing process. Sales would even be considered lazy.

The vicious cycle continues. The perceived differences often lead to miscommunication, friction, and other sales and marketing misalignment issues.

To summarize: marketing and sales are notorious for not getting along. However, they need to for a company to thrive. If misalignment is not handled correctly, it could cost your company time, money, and customers in the long run. Fortunately, there is a solution: work on your sales and marketing alignment. But what exactly is sales and marketing alignment?

Sales and marketing alignment is a shared system of communication, strategy, and goals that enable marketing and sales to operate as a unified organization. Working together, aligned teams can deliver high-impact marketing activities, boost sales effectiveness, and ultimately grow revenue. This mutual participation in accordance with a singular target creates an atmosphere of encouragement and assistance.

What is the solution?

The solution we propose is a strategy called Sales Enablement. By aligning sales and marketing along the lines of this strategy you can improve performance of your employees and gain more insight into the buyer journey of your clients.

Want to read more and learn how to put marketing and sales alignment into practice? Click here to download our free white paper.