Wide Angle

Frank Sinatra famously crooned that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.  Little did he know that, in an ironic bit of pop culture repurposing, the song would come to signify the often hostile—though ultimately committed—relationship between Peggy and Al Bundy in the TV sitcom Married … With Children.

Dysfunctional?  Yes.   Mutually dependent?  Absolutely.

The same can be said of Sales and Marketing.  The two functions often butt heads behind closed doors, but their cooperation and interconnectedness is necessary to achieve key business objectives.  Of course, getting the two groups on the same page is often easier said than done.  We typically see breakdowns in the following areas:

• Commercial strategy: the building blocks of position and go-to-market approach
• Customer centricity: the extent to which processes and structures map to customer needs and workflows
• Customer understanding: an organization’s ability to capture and apply insights and information
• Plan execution: a commercial team’s ability to put strategy into action

How well integrated is your commercial team across these categories?

If you’re an MLC member, it’s easy to find out.  Our 15-minute online diagnostic surfaces areas of misalignment between your organization’s Sales and Marketing teams.  We’ll provide you with detailed analysis that highlights strengths, weaknesses, and activity division of labor, helping you prioritize which areas to fix first.