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Despite all the information about how to align sales and marketing, most organizations will fail.
This is based on our own experience speaking with sales and marketing directors organizations who have tried.
Why is this?
Read more to see the three most common reasons we come across.
1) Strategic failure: You think you have a shared vision around the integrated sales and marketing organization but you don’t
Let’s ask members of your management team to draw how your perfectly aligned sales and marketing organization looks. How many different models do you think you will get?
In our experience, very rarely does anyone draw a similar picture. Or even close. But almost always do people believe they have the same vision.
Instead, they spend considerable time and effort running in different directions. The end result is rarely what anyone wanted. So they start over, and the cycle repeats itself.
This is where having a visual model of aligned sales and marketing processes based on best practices can help.
2) Execution failure: Has anybody in your team integrated sales and marketing organizations before?
Let’s say you do share the same vision. Everybody knows where you want to end up. Now, how do you get there?
This is next big reason why organizations fail to align integrate their sales and marketing processes. It is very rare to find someone who has already done it previously, and who can advise on practical guidelines and best practices.
For example: Which tools to use? Which leads to pass on? How to pass on those leads in practice? How to best follow them up and track how the follow up is working? How to pass leads from sales back to marketing? What to do with leads that need to be nurtured?
Most organizations tackle these questions through trial-and-error. But that slows down the project significantly: What could have been achieved in weeks takes months or even years. And the integration project risks never fully materializing.
3) Resource failure: Who will put in the time to build and tweak your new integrated sales and marketing processes?
Let’s imagine you know what to do, and how to do it. But who will have the time to actually do it?
This is perhaps the most frustrating part.
You come to work every day knowing what needs to be done.
But every evening, you leave frustrated because the day-to-day emergencies and distractions prevented you from getting any closer to you goal.
So what to do?
You have just seen the three most common reasons we come across why organizations fail to integrate sales and marketing. You are not alone in these frustrations.
But what can you do about them?
In the next blog post, we will go through how you can overcome these challenges and succeed with your sales and marketing integration initiative.
(This blog post is part 9 in a series of 10. Click this link for a table of contents to all all blog posts in this complete guide to sales and marketing alignment.)
