Marketing Alignment is critical to Sales Enablement

Marketing alignment has become quit the buzzword recently, but what does it really mean.  My own biased background has been on the sales side so my reference point has traditionally been that marketing is aligned when they are doing exactly what sales wants them to do, regardless of whether or not sales knows what it is doing or what it wants.  Product Managers have told me that marketing should be aligned to the products and solutions being offered.  Makes sense in a way, you wouldn’t want to market a Mercedes the same way that you would market a Daewoo.  Marketers have told me that marketing is aligned when sales finally sells the product the way that marketing has said they must.  Obviously, I am trying to get to a point.  In my last post, we talked about starting the training process by understanding or creating your value proposition in cooperation between sales, marketing, and product management.  If we are going to achieve marketing alignment, we have to understand what we want them to be aligned with.  The easy answer is that marketing should be aligned with your value proposition and your customers’ buying process (which is mirrored in your sales process).

I’ll talk about lead generation in another post, so let’s focus on the assets that marketing should be producing to support (i.e. enable) the sales (i.e. buying) process.  Think of the buying process as a series of conversations that buyers have with prospective sellers that eventually lead them to a purchase or the realization that their money would be better spent elsewhere.  Based on your value proposition, what are the types of conversations that your sales teams will be having.  Once you have an idea of the conversations, it becomes much easier to identify, design, and deliver the best assets possible.  You might be considering video clips, webinars and other social media for the front end of your demand generation funnel.  As opportunities move through the buying process, your sales organization may be in need of more detailed and specific assets such as solution presentations, integration and implementation guides (If marketing does not own these, they won’t be very useful before the sale, where they can be very powerful), solution whitepapers, industry whitepapers, customer testimonials, case studies, and reference stories.  Assets don’t have to be static either.  Live interaction with customers and industry experts should also be considered as part of your portfolio of available assets.  As you move on to the later stages of the buying process, what types of assets will be required?  Will you need value calculators, quantified success stories, or negotiating crib sheets?

I wanted to discuss the asset side of the equation first so that I could paint a picture that really shows the scope and depth of the assets that will be needed.  This is where you need to truly focus on alignment.  It is one thing to create a massive library of assets with a navigation structure that only a marketing guru could navigate, it is quite another to enable your sales organization by delivering just the right assets at the right time in the buying process, related to the right industry and business issues being addressed.  That’s right, your sales teams will not be able to nor will they want to navigate some intranet or “knowledge garden” as it was called at one company at which I worked.  If this is what you have done, your assets will get stale and sales will claim that they can’t find anything they need.  Marketing is not supporting them.  Don’t waste money creating the asset if you can’t deliver it when and where it is needed.

In summary, marketing alignment is easier to talk about, or more specifically to complain about than it is to achieve.  Think about your value proposition and your customers’ buying process, think about the conversations that will lead to a sale, create the assets, and then find a way to deliver them to the right place at the right time.  Finally, ask yourself how you are going to keep it all “fresh”.

I am off to Virginia for a family vacation next week, but I will pick up where I left off on the 28^th.

-Bruce A. Brien, CEO, Stratascope Inc.