Despite the best intentions, the conventional thinking of marketing and sales leaders around how to align these two teams is flawed, as it addresses the symptoms rather than the cause of the chasm. Without a common design point the customer’s problem-solving cycle all other efforts to align these two groups are like trying to mix oil and water.

Something interesting happens at organizations where effective marketing and sales alignment occurs, they win. According to a report by Aberdeen Research, companies that are best-in-class at aligning marketing and sales experienced an average of 20% growth in annual revenue, compared to a 4% decline in laggard organizations.

The Essentials of Sales and Marketing Alignment
Too often, sales and marketing each have individual goals that seem compatible. Marketing creates sales messaging and tools and generates leads for the sales team. Sales teams use the messaging and tools to transform those leads into revenue. In practice, however, it rarely works this way. Sales and marketing alignment begins with shared definitions. What is a contact? A qualified lead? Opportunity? And what are the sales stages? An inability to agree on definitions is the most common impediment to organization reaching their revenue potential.

The marketing message you develop and deliver across the buyer’s journey isn’t just your story, it’s the primary factor on devolping your differentiation strategy. You need assurance that the story your marketers and salespeople tell at each key phase of the customer lifecycle is supported by tested and proven research, not merely good feelings, “best practices”, or magical thinking.

If you based your message based on what customers are telling you, what their needs are whether it’s through voice of a customer research or salespeople doing discovery questions, you are then incline to connect those identified needs to the specific capabilities that responds to those needs right?

Here is the problem of creating your so-called value messaging and value proposition in a blue area.

You are going to be delivered commodity message in the market that would not differentiate you, why? Because all of your competitors are relying on and responding to the exact same inputs from prospects and customers and more or less you will respond with similar capabilities to meet those needs.

The result is a commoditised conversation but how can that be? You did everything the way you have been told and trained all these years, sadly for all that effort your prospects and customers will see a little difference and they will become very indecisive or if they do actually make a decision they will turn to the one place they can make some differentiation and try to get you to lower your price.

What’s happen next? You start a desperate search for differentiation and the typical go-to move for the companies is to start introducing which you believe to be strong capabilities of your company that are outside of the blue area. There are unknown strengths to the prospect which you start introducing into the story and calling them your value-added services.

These are supposed to be the key differences that separates you from your competitors but there is just one big problem with these so-called value-added capabilities, you prospect don’t hear your message the way you intend it.

Decision-making research identified something called choice overload so in this situation what really happen when you introduce these additional value-added capabilities is that the customer perceives them not as value-add but instead as adding cost and complexity, the exact opposite of what you intended.

In order to create a sense of urgency to change and a strong preference for you and your solution, Yes you have to get outside the blue area, but you need to introduce to your prospect some unconsidered needs.

These are the problems or challenges that they are unaware or they undervalued and they have potential impact on their business. This create a sense of urgency to change and create a context to introduce your unknown strengths, now your prospect has a reason to care about these strengths. They go from not adding value in the blue area to being invaluable when told in the yellow area, and this is what we call your distinct point of view.

It is here that your message and customer conversation can create unexpected urgency to make a change and show unique value by amplifying the need for the under-appreciated strength of your organization. Unfortunately most companies are stuck in the blue area, for this reason a good strategy about corporate positioning and marketing and sales alignment can help.

Are your sales and marketing teams aligned? If so, how has your business benefits from it?

If not, Schedule a discussion with our expert and we’ll show you how to bridge your sales and marketing teams.