What does marketing need to understand about sales to align toward common goals?

Lynn: Great question and some great responses. Some of my thoughts:

1. Realize we're playing for the same team. Too often, too much energy and resource is wasted on internal fingerpointing. We have aligned goals to achieve the company business plan, each is dependent on the other for success.
2. Stop talking about the marketing process/cycle and sales process/cycle as separate. They are intertwined--sales needs to be involved earlier than traditional, marketing needs to be involved later than traditional. More and more, in B2B, sales will be initiating the conversation, then marketing will be nurturing, then sales... then marketing....
3. Collaboration: We need to stop speaking of sales and marketing separately, but how they work together. In basketball, we never talk just about the function of centers or forwards or guards. We talk about the team. We work on plays for the team. Yet we still separte the discussions of sales and marketing. Let's change it.

I'll stoop here.

Their goals and objectives have to align. Marketing has to understand, at a peer to peer level from the bottom up, the state of the business. If Sales isn't clear on how Marketing programs will drive revenue/pipe or increase customer experience/participation then you will see stalled execution of programs.

I want to build on Craig's answer which covers the major topics.

On a higher level, I think we need to understand that marketing (also portfolio groups) and sales have different views, different perspectives.
Marketing has a Go-To-Market view, a broader, a macro perspective, a market lens and is defining common solutions. Sales instead has a more specific, a micro view, a customer / account perspective and needs to solve very specific customer problems.
So, Marketing comes from a Go-To-Market view, and sales comes from a Go-To-Customer view, but both don't see that gap. Accepting that sales needs a translation to a Go-To-Customer approach is a major milestone on the way to align toward common goals.

The Go-To-Customer approach needs to be derived from the sales and coverage model and from the Go-To-Market strategy, especially if a sales organization is focused on a named account strategy and a wallet share approach.
Providing frameworks and tools that help sales people to navigate from go-to-market to go-to-customer is a very valuable and important responsibility for sales enablement teams.

More on that topic:
Strategic Accounts – Why We Need To Connect Go-To-Market Models With Go-To-Customer Models
http://blog.tamaraschenk.com/?p=36

Marketing is Strategic - Sales is Tactical

Marketing develops the long-term goals, tools and processes.

A well defined and documented Sales Process along with the tools and processes necessary for Sales to find their target market, engage, walk them through the pipeline and convert to clients.

For the marketing plan to work, you must gain insight from the front line sales people. Get their feedback and allow them to participate in defining the sales process and developing the tools that they need to choose from tactically, day-to-day.

When you Create a Team of Marketing and Sales Professionals, your business will evolve to gain new market share and achieve long-term sustainable growth.

Mark Fawcett
Marketing Targeted Advisor
Twitter @FawcettGroup

There's no cut and dry answer. Marketing typically gives sales the value proposition, brand positioning, competitive advantages, sales collateral, talking points, etc. and sets the stage for sales through publicity and creation of desire for the product. A great marketing or ad campaign, as we've seen, can cause sales to flood in, making it like shooting fish in a barrel. Not always so easy though.

I think marketing needs to understand that sales is an individual sport, not a team sport. Alignment is a great term when talking about working as a team but most sales comp plans are not set up that way. Top performers get paid the most because they beat everyone else. Forget trying to make everyone perform the same; it is not healthy.

Marketing is all about creating demand, and sales is about closing the deal--two connected, but very different business processes. Sales can no more survive without strategy than Marketing can without tactics.

I've often heard the observation that 'marketing is strategic, and sales is tactical.' But that's a convenient confusion that leads companies down so many wrong pathways. Those companies devote resources toward the seemingly-cerebral marketing functions--demand generation, product engineering, pricing, advertising, target marketing--only to wonder why the sales force keeps screwing things up. "Must be bad tactics!" Maybe. But any root cause analysis for sales performance gaps should consider lack of strategy, executing the wrong strategy, or executing the right strategy the wrong way.

In any case, it's management's job to lead, and when people observe that marketing and sales are "out of alignment," the first place to look is how management is leading the team. There is an organizational vision and purpose, and it's management's job to synchronize the efforts of different people and departments toward the purpose. Few organizational entities are self-aligning, nice as it might be.

Dave Brock is on the right track, though I want to take it a step further.

Marketing, Sales and Customer Service are separate functions within a company, perform separate tasks and carry separate accountability. But is that how it should be? They all, after all, serve the same customer.

Think of this like the engine in your car. There is a cooling system, electrical system, drive system, fuel system, exhaust system and lubrication system. Which of these can your engine do without? Of course your engine will stop running if any of these systems are not working properly.

Each of these systems exist and function separately in your engine. There are two things, however, that keep them all both working and in sync: the timing chain and the drive belt. The timing chain keeps your electrical, fuel and exhaust systems in perfect sync (all fuel and no spark = no results, and vice-versa) and the drive belt keeps all other systems running.

The question is, does your company have a timing chain and a drive belt?

Marketing, Sales and Customer Service are your electrical, fuel and exhaust systems, and must be kept in perfect sync if you wish a problem free customer experience and the resultant increase of net margin. This can only happen if these departments consider themselves teammates and operate accordingly, and it follows that these department heads meet as a cohesive team regularly. Marketing's spark, Sales's fuel, and Customer Service's feedback from the real world are all necessary in equal measure and weight to achieve the best performance possible.

Together, let's put the fun back into work!
Belldon Colme
belldoncolme@gmail.com

I agree with Craig's response and Tamara's build on that, so won't add a lot of detail. At a high level, I like to think in terms of one, consistent commercial conversation with the prospect. Marketing starts the conversation, then makes an introduction to Sales, and Sales closes the deal. Throughout, the conversation becomes more and more specific, but it must be one conversation. Practically, this is deployed through messaging that will matter to the target prospect, tools that will actually be used in the lead nurturing and selling process, and the sales skills necessary to deploy the messaging in sales interactions that move the prospect toward the firm's unique solution.

The customer, and the conversation with her, provide common ground around which both Marketing and Sales should rally. More on this at "Referee for Marketing and Sales? Try a Customer" http://wp.me/p1VyEz-3H

Brian