While this article is a bit "fluffy" it's talks about "why", rather than a "How", it does add to the debate and the fact of the matter is that sales and marketing need to be aligned in this social world.
What we are seeing with our clients is that there is a direct correlation, shifting sands you could say as sales and marketing look to change roles in the new world of the internet, mobile and social.
Why is this?
1. Content - We know that "corporate marketing" is now just noise. Everybody is the best and so your target audience just tune out. There is an need to insight and educate and marketing need to be support sales. Not just in creating content, but empowering sales (and the employees) to write.
2. Common Language - How many times have we been sitting in meetings and talked about leads, and everybody was talking about different things?
3. Move away from Leads and Talk about Accounts - While you may or may not have an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, we all know that there are more than one decision maker and we need to talk with everybody. Not just our mates, otherwise we will be outsold.
4. We all know that Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu) and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) require different content and different types of people to deal with the buyers, how will sales and marketing deal with this.
It's time to stop throwing stones at each other and work together.
According to Ranstad, 80% of businesses recognize the multiple benefits of aligning sales and marketing. This is really encouraging for a future that more companies will break down the silos among teams. However, it has also been observed in the same report that 60% of the companies aren’t still bringing the teams together.
