It seems that sales and marketing alignment, unlike a doctors exam, is something everybody wants to do. It feels like we get an email a day from Marketo or Eloqua on alignment issues, ranking as a topic only slightly behind insights on how to integrate social media into the mix. The esteemed CSO Insights and Aberdeen Group ranks sales effectiveness and alignment as a continuing key issue in 2011 for the head of sales in any company, big or small.
What’s common about a lot of these? Generally it’s a marketing company tackling the issue from a mainly marketing perspective. In other words, somewhat too ‘influenced’ by the holder of the pen. The approach of “lets tell sales about alignment” is in, our opinion, not as successful as the “lets cough together” approach. This is just as hard to do as it is potentially humiliating. My sales colleague and I debate continually about how to approach this issue for any client, and I guess that’s the ultimate key to success; constructive communication, probably with lots of conflict thrown in for good measure.
Not that Marketo or Eloqua advice is bad. In fact it’s very good. I am much more wary of the literally hundreds of web and public relations companies that want to teach me how to log on to Facebook yet have no clue whatsoever about how to link communications to demand generation and sales conversion. Don’t get me going.
So we thought, as a real hybrid sales and marketing alignment company, why shouldn’t we give it a go? CSO Insights agreed. Why not discuss how social media has impacted alignment at the same time?
So we are proud to announce our white paper: “ALIGNING SALES & MARKETING IN A SOCIALLY NETWORKED WORLD”. You can get it from CSO Insights here. And, we’re not ashamed to say, if you want to talk turkey about how we could help your company with this issue, in a manner that brings together pure sales with pure marketing expertise, give us a call right now (hint: use the web connect buttons on the bottom right of your screen).