Today's post is by Richard Eppel, Principal, Strategic Momentum, Inc.

Many companies recognize the importance of marketing and sales alignment, yet they struggle with the task of creating and maintaining alignment between these organizations. One of the issues in many companies is that, the sales organization's measure of success is different than the marketing organization.

Many times, sales organizations feel like the lone ranger. Typically, when sales are falling short of the company's objectives, the sales organization bears the brunt of everyone's disappointment. Everyone looks to the sales organization, as if they are the only part of the company responsible for sales results. Yes, it is true they own the selling process, and ultimately they close the sale, but what is rarely recognized is that everyone plays a part in making the sale possible.

Since every company is a system perfectly designed to produce the revenue it is producing if you want more revenue you have to change the system design. This means you have to tune the organizational effectiveness to support the sales process; you have to recognize that everyone affects sales results by the decisions they make daily and how effective they coordinate customer facing actions. Sales results are the scorecard for the entire company, not just the marketing organization. Revenue is a downstream measure of the organizational effectiveness upstream.

This means bringing the entire company into the revenue generation game. Every function within the company that touches the customer, directly or indirectly, can affect revenue generation. This is a powerful perspective that looks at the sales organization as the interface between the entire organization and the customer. This means that the relationship the sales organization has with the other company functions, especially marketing, is just as important as the relationship the sales organization has with its customers.

There are three steps you have to take to align the entire organization to significantly improve the revenue generation capacity of the organization.

Step 1: Create a compelling vision, strategy and strategic objectives that are shared and committed to by the entire organization.

Step 2: Evaluate the current processes and the team capabilities to see if they are aligned with the vision, strategy and strategic objectives.

Step 3: Align the organization's processes and capabilities to the vision, strategy and strategic objectives.

This approach recognizes that you have to align all organizational actions within the system to produce sustainable revenue generation and growth. While, it is critical that marketing and sales operate to an aligned marketing and sales plan, it is just as critical that alignment be driven down through the entire organization. Since every customer facing action people take ether supports or enhances the company's brand or detracts from it, marketing is in a perfect position to take a leadership role to align all company functions to become a revenue generating machine.

The author works with CEOs, company owners and senior management to significantly improve business performance by improving their strategies, systems, processes, and team dynamics to enable breakaway innovation. Eppel has over ten years of consulting experience across a number of industries.