By Whitney Satin
Sales and marketing leaders constantly look for ways to build greater alignment between their two functions. But efforts to enact joint planning or sync activities across the purchase funnel stall right out of the gates if the two functions don’t first develop a shared view of the customer.
This may sound like an obvious first step but, more often than not, Sales and Marketing aren’t on the same page when it comes to having a common understanding of customer needs. We often hear tales of Sales accusing Marketing of being notoriously slow and impractical when analyzing customer needs, while marketers argue that Sales “manages by anecdote” and misses broader trends across segments. This tension ultimately hampers the organization’s ability to truly meet customer needs and capture new opportunities as they appear in the marketplace.
So how can sales and marketing teams get this right? It comes down to effectively sharing customer knowledge between the two functions and then building consensus around the most pressing customer pain points and how the company will address them. This affords the broader commercial enterprise the flexibility to respond to changing customer behaviors while, most critically, clarifying how the company differs from competitors in a meaningful way.
Arriving at shared customer understanding breaks down into three components:
1. Understand customer needs.
Deep understanding of customers allows Sales and Marketing to develop, position, and deliver competitively differentiated offers that resonate with target customers. Start by establishing a common framework. Many organizations will use voice of the customer (VOC), though increasingly we’ve seen these approaches supplemented by efforts to surface unarticulated customer needs and underlying objectives. Needs- and outcomes-based approaches provide commercial teams with greater opportunity to arrive at differentiated customer insights.
MLC members can learn more about surfacing customer outcomes in our 6-minute video tutorial.
2. Compile a customer information inventory.
Information about customers is typically scattered throughout the organization. Sales and Marketing must tap CRM data, market research, and even the tacit knowledge of internal business partners to establish an accurate baseline of what is (and what is not) known about existing customers.
Populating a learning agenda catalogues existing knowledge while also exposing areas where additional information is needed in order to portray a holistic view of the customer. Synthesizing these disparate pieces of information in a disciplined manner creates a common view of customers that spans both Sales and Marketing.
3. Facilitate dynamic knowledge-sharing.
Given that customer behavior can change dramatically based on market dynamics, Sales and Marketing need cross-silo sharing tools and platforms that allow them to enrich the customer knowledge baseline in an ongoing and easily consumable way. Embedding motivational drivers and simplifying input requirements to CRM systems can go a long way as far as encouraging both Sales and Marketing to contribute to and draw from more complete customer information.
MLC members, check out our new Shared Customer Understanding resource center for case studies, tools, and templates to help your sales and marketing teams get on the same page.
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