Sales and Marketing Alignment ***Wait for image to load, please.***

With all this talk about sales and marketing alignment, I figured the best way to get sales and marketing aligned is to morph a sales guy into a marketing guy and visa versa.  That way they’ll both understand what life is like as a member of the other team.

So Brian and I tried it out, just to see.

Let us know what you think.

Check out my podcast interview with Brian.

Morphing courtesy of www.MorpheusSoftware.net

We’ve just published my interview with Brian Carroll for my sales thought-leader podcast series. 

Wait!  Brian Carroll is a sales thought-leader? 

Absolutely. 

All of us in sales face a significant and ongoing challenge.  I’ve written about it again and again.  It’s the lack of mutual understanding, alignment, and ability to effectively and jointly execute among many sales and marketing organizations.

Brian understands the issues and has pragmatic approaches for overcoming them. Here is Brian’s blog.

In this podcast, we talk about:

• What works to get sales and marketing alignment
• How the marketing funnel impacts the sales funnel 
• Reengaging and optimizing past sales leads
• Teleprospecting and nurturing tactics

Listen to the podcast.  (Also available on iTunes.)

This Wednesday (July 9) I’ll be presenting a webinar about how sales (in general) is not presently getting the job done and what needs to be done about it going into the future.   I’ll share relevant research and strong recommendations based upon what we’ve learned through ESR’s research and direct work with our clients. (The webinar is hosted by The TAS Group.)

This is a topic I’ve spoken about before.  I presented a similar webinar a few months ago for ISBM.  Last September I delivered a keynote on the subject in Dublin for a group of CEOs. 

This is serious business. I’ve said it many times before: Sales lags all other departments within corporations with respect to process, measurement and productivity.

Here are the five areas that we believe need immediate and long-term focus:

1. More discipline and process
2. New approaches to training
3. Sales and marketing alignment
4. Technology-enabled selling and Sales 2.0
5. Sales performance measurement

I’ll delve into each of these on Wednesday.

Quite often I get questions about how long it will take to complete various sales performance improvement interventions.  (It’s the business equivalent of, “Are we there yet?”)

I’ll answer some of those questions one by one before I philosophize:

A: Think one to three years, depending on the size and capabilities of the team, your selling environment, your training vendor, how many tools and processes must be built, getting a measurement system in place, getting your CRM system integrated with your sales methodology, your company’s and team’s ability to adapt to what might be significant change, etc.

A: Three months to a year, again depending on the circumstances.

A: Based on our experience, 3 to 6 months.

You can have it:

Right Away,
Cheap, or
Good.
Pick only two out of the three. 

The point here is simply this. Whether you are embarking on a sales performance improvement intervention, renovations on your home or tutoring for your child, you’ve got to decide what’s important.

From the questions I get it seems that people are most often focused on “right away.” If “right away” is what you need, that’s fine, but what are you willing to give up?