Here is a great Harvard Business Review brief by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy via Slideshare on how to end the war between sales and marketing. I found it interesting that the paper was published in 2006 and we are still struggling with creating sales and marketing aligned organizations today. The authors also provide a neat scoring criteria to help you baseline your organization today and how to move towards a better model if certain characteristics warrant it.
Some major takeaways from the brief:
- Encourage disciplined communication
- Create joint assignments; rotate jobs
- Appoint a liaison from Marketing to work with the sales force
- Colocate marketers and salespeople
- Improve sales force feedback
- Appoint a chief revenue (or customer) officer
- Define the steps in the marketing and sales funnels
- Split Marketing into two groups
- Set shared revenue targets and reward systems.
- Integrate Sales and Marketing metrics
The full brief is very informative for organizations looking to get real scientific on sales and marketing alignment. The biggest benefits for B2B sales organizations is that sales reps work more sales ready leads, spend more of the time working viable deals and closing them, while marketing is able to deliver more consistent revenue that is attributed to the right campaign or lead source so a marketing ROI can be determined. Rinse, wash, repeat.