Svenska
Have you ever worried that your sales and marketing initiative won’t lead to actual results?
That months or even years of effort will show for nothing?
This thought scares many of the sales and marketing managers we meet. Today we’ll explain how you can avoid the most common risks by using sales and marketing consultants.
Read more to learn how.
Three reasons your sales and marketing alignment initiative could fail
In the previous blog post, we outlined the three most common reasons we’ve seen why sales and marketing alignment initiatives fail:
Strategic failure: The first reason is that they fail to create a shared vision. They think they do, but they end up running in different directions.
Execution failure: The second reason is that they fail to execute the vision because of lack of experience in sales and marketing integration initiatives.
Resource failure: And the final reason is that they get bogged down by day-to-day operations. They come into the office with a clear goal, but end up leaving frustrated and feeling like they didn’t have time to accomplish what they set out to do.
Which of these risks pose the biggest threat for you?
When using sales and marketing consultants can be a good idea
Have you ever wondered why consultants exist in the first place? Isn’t it better to simply insource everything using employees, who are cheaper anyway?
Internal employees and external consultants have very different reason for existing.
The main difference is this:
- Internal employees exist to run existing processes and make decisions about which processes need to change
- External consultants exist to help set new processes up through well-defined, temporary projects
Aligning your sales and marketing organizations could impact you for years. Below we’ll explain why getting external help can help you avoid the most common mistakes.
Why sales and marketing consultants can help you avoid the most common mistakes
Since the impact of aligning sales and marketing can be felt for years, it is a good idea to plan the change well.
Consultants are often specialized in specific types of change. Find the right consultants who specialize in sales and marketing alignment. They have probably created models, examples and best practices around the change you are trying to make.
By marrying your knowledge about your organization with their expertise around sales and marketing alignment, you can apply relevant best practices to your business. This solves the strategic failure and execution failure risks we mentioned.
And using consultants’ additional manpower, you bypass the resource failure risk.
Below is a summary:
| Internal Employees | External Consultants | |
| Reason for existing | Run existing processes and decide which processes need to change | Implement new processes |
| Key Skill | Your business | Best practices for the type of change you want to make |
| Addressing strategic failure | Adopt shared vision to your business | Create shared vision based on best practices |
| Addressing execution failure | Adopt implementation plan best practices to your business | Create implementation plan based on best practices |
| Addressing resource failure | Migrate existing processes according to change | Bring resources to create new processes |
In this post, we showed you how you can reduce the risk of failing your sales and marketing initiative by hiring using consultants.
This concludes our series of 10 posts about sales and marketing alignment. In the previous posts, we have shown you how a fully aligned sales and marketing organization looks, and which processes integrate sales and marketing teams.
In the next post we will summarize the entire series and link to all articles in it in order, so that you can read each post that applies to you. See it here: A full guide to sales and marketing alignment.
