The case for better Sales and Marketing alignment is pretty obvious to most Marketers—selling and marketing in concert stands to yield much better results than doing them each independently.  Unfortunately, what actually leads to good Sales and Marketing alignment has eluded most of us for a long time.  We’ve been collecting data on the topic for a few months now, and have come across a couple of admittedly simple but thought provoking findings:

1. Very few companies are good at this stuff…

• About a quarter of companies are happy with the flow of information between groups.
• About a quarter of companies feel like they manage the purchase funnel competently.
• About a third of companies believe that Sales and Marketing deliver consistent messages to customers.

Based on the amount of interest we’ve seen in the alignment topic over the last six months, this probably shouldn’t have surprised us.  The second early finding did.

2. Success isn’t a function of what activities Sales and Marketing prioritize, but it is a function of how closely those priorities match up.

We got to this second finding through an incredibly simple analysis: looking at how closely Sales and Marketing prioritize 20 common Sales and Marketing responsibilities, things like Lead Generation, Segmentation, and collecting Voice of the Customer.  It turns out that the order in which companies prioritized these activities had almost no bearing on how successfully a company goes to market (measured by the indicators from #1 above and a few others).  How closely Sales and Marketing prioritized the responsibilities turned out to be a fantastic predictor of success.  Companies who had tight alignment across their priorities (see the illustration below) were much more effective at every one of our success metrics.

Figure 1: Levels of Agreement Between Sales and Marketing Functions at Two Sample Companies

Click Image to Enlarge | Companies with strong agreement across their priorities are more effective at achieving organizational and commercial outcomes.

What does this mean for marketers?

Our early read is that even if strategic plans for Sales and Marketing are hatched on opposite ends of the globe, Marketing and Sales need to find some opportunity to reconcile those plans and come up with a shared list of priorities.  At a minimum, it’s a good idea to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each function, and then get a read on what is and isn’t working from the other side’s perspective.

MLC Members, If you’re interested in getting an assessment of Sales and Marketing alignment at your own organization, we’d love to help you get started.  Council members can take the Commercial Integration Diagnostic (sorry, I didn’t name it, Timur did) to see how closely aligned their priorities are and get a read from their counterparts on how well the Sales and Marketing machine is running today.

Related posts:

1. Sales and Marketing: Moving Beyond “Managed Dissatisfaction”
2. Are Mixed Messages from Sales and Marketing Leaving Your Customers Confused?
3. Align Sales and Marketing Around a Common View of the Customer
4. Sales and Marketing: Does the Left Hand Know the Right Hand Exists?
5. Sales and Marketing: You Can’t Have One without the Other