Are you ready to launch your marketing effort, and wondering why you are the only one excited? The targeting is so good, the communications and offers so insightful, consumers cannot help but respond. Yet the salesforce treats your program as “dead on arrival”
What went wrong?
Many of our clients find themselves in the similar situation — they have spent so much time in planning and developing their marketing programs, they failed to recognize that someone else was responsible for getting the ball over the goal line — the sales and operations team.
In an insightful article by Kris Bondi, she identifies some of the key mistakes that marketers make that lead to lack of alignment with sales. She cites five key reasons for the failure of marketers to connect with their vital sales partners. Enjoy.
I will be writing about challenges of aligning sales and marketing in developing, planning and executing data-driven customer programs in the future.
Amplify’d from www.marketingprofs.com
Since CMO Council’s report, many marketers have believed that simply forwarding leads with varying degrees of qualification or making marketing collateral available to a sales team meant sufficiently supporting Sales. That isn’t the case.
In fact, a recent IDC study, citing the 80/20 rule, states that “up to 80% of the content [that] marketing generates is not used by sales, even though a lot of it is specifically created for sales and channel enablement.” Ouch. For marketers, all the wasted time and money—not to mention potentially being seen as not adding value—hurts.
Beyond the obvious mistake of assuming that Sales and Marketing alignment means simply addressing when the sales team receives leads, marketers continue to make these five classic mistakes:
- Not listening to the field
- Giving Sales the wrong materials
- Assuming the field will “make due”
- Keeping too much control
- Embracing one technology fix
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ao8i3
