What leadership changes are required to facilitate sales and marketing collaboration

This question assumes that leadership is the problem. To Alex's point above, the leader cannot simply mandate alignment, as alignment itself is not the problem, but rather a symptom of a greater problem. As long as leaders continue to focus on the symptom and not address the problem, alignment issues will continue to persist.

The fundamental problem that is causing alignment are as follows:

- Lack of a fundamental lead management process. By not having a marketing & sales defined process on how contacts and leads will be managed, leads get lost, there is no definitions for every stage of the buying journey and marketing does what they feel is right and sales does the same. As this is the case, there cannot possibly be any kind of alignment regardless of leadership mandate.

- Lack of customer focus. The number of sales and marketing people that are unable to clearly define who their customer is, how they buy and what their challenges are is alarming. Marketing and sales need to begin to collaborate around the customer and begin developing their content/engagement strategy and understand how they will shape the dialogue with their buyers. The days of generating leads and then having sales call to sale, should be over, but in reality they are not. I still get calls every week asking if I want to see a demo or if I can spare 30-minutes of my time for a sales discussions. A focus on the customer by both marketing and sales avoids this and enables true dialogue and fosters discussion based on the buyers need, not the vendors.

- Revenue Measurement: While there has been a lot of discussion on the importance of measuring revenue, this is still not happening. I spoke this week to about 100 marketers and asked the question how many were measuring impact to revenue and pipeline - only about 7 raised their hands. The goal of a corporation is to generate revenue and this has to be a measurement goal of marketing as it is for sales. If marketing is not in the business of measuring this, then they will not align with sales in any way and the divid will continue to grow.

If leadership wants to make changes and address the alignment gap, begin to focus on the problem, not the symptom.

Carlos Hidalgo
@cahidalgo

Very interesting discussion and valid points made by all. However there is one area that I believe should be highlighted.

Carlos' comments resonate with my experience, a misalignment between Marketing and Sales is a symptom of a much larger problem. Also if there is a misalignment between Marketing and Sales, you can be pretty sure that there are further misalignments with other departments.

Based on my experience, even with an alignment between Marketing and Sales, there would not be a dramatic increase in revenue if the other departments within a company aren't synchronized with Marketing and Sales. Case in point, how easy would it be to sell to existing customers if the other departments (operations, supply chain, R&D, customer support etc) didn't deliver what was promised by Marketing and Sales?

In my opinion, the entire company needs to be aligned not just 2 departments. As to how this could take place, I believe it starts with a jointly agreed upon vision, strategy, cross departmental business plans and processes as well as targets and metrics shared by multiple departments to measure performance. This becomes easier when the entire company shifts it's focus away from making the numbers and towards fulfilling customers' visible and dormant needs.

Nic,

Regarding your question “What leadership changes are required to facilitate sales and marketing collaboration” – the answer can be many different responses. Typically, for an effective collaborative sales and marketing team to exists, are the culture, goals and incentives shared between the two organizations? “C” level executives have to set the expectations – “V” level leaders align to the trend whereby many companies typically put the two organizations at odds, thereby creating an environment which effectively causes the dysfunctional behaviors – kind of a cause and effect.

Specific to the leadership team – again, “C” level executives have to set the expectations as the change for a true collaborative sales and marketing team has to be established from the top, as the “Shadow of the Leader” will provide team members throughout the two organizations with a clear understanding to the shared vision and goals that will affect the respective organizations, as to what is the norm or expectation for how to move forward.

You have to assess if the current “V” level leadership team is too entrenched and unwilling/unable to make the shift, as opposed to changing out to employ new talent who is empowered by the “C” level executive(s), to pursue the desired collaborative, integrated team – as sales and marketing – not just the Sales team and the Marketing team. While not a quick fix, “C” level exec’s must be consistent with a commitment to change that the sales and marketing team rallies behind, provide appropriate support, with joint shared goals, and include as part of each leaders respective performance plans for the new year – you can initiate the change – but don’t expect an immediate turnaround, as this behavior is typically seen as transformational in nature to obtain the desired collaboration goals.

Nic, that's a challenging question. You already mentioned important topics in your question, leadership changes and collaboration. That's beyond the standard sales and marketing „alignment“ questions which are often missing the point - from my point of view.
Here is why: The design point why we need to discuss this question is not inside the organization, it's outside. Regarding your question, the design point is the customer.
Pervading this design point and reflecting all internal current processes, tools, behaviors and comfort zones in sales and marketing and also portfolio groups from the customer's point of view will ultimately lead to the topics you mentioned: leadership and collaboration.

Have a look at internal processes in marketing, sales and portfolio, and ask the question how often it's really about the customer, and how often it's about internal decision gates and how often people talk about the customer only in terms of internal KPI's such as order entry, revenue, leads, opportunities, and show a tendency to forget that customers are only buying if we can solve their problems and add value? You get the picture, it's often all about us, and not about them...

I'm not so sure if we should talk about leadership "changes", because I think leadership is from my point of view always about change, how to address change and how to initiate change in a storytelling way explaining the why to change and very important - from what into what.
Sounds easy, but it's often the most difficult question.

I'd like to quote Peter Drucker who said in 2004: “The CEO is the link between the Inside that is ‘the organization,’ and the Outside of society, economy, technology, markets, and customers. Inside there are only costs. Results are only on the outside.”

That means, creating the vision and mission of a real customer-centric organization, where all internal groups, not only marketing and sales are designed backwards from the customer, that's a C- level, especially a CEO's job. It's also a CEO's job to define where and how the organization needs to collaborate with the outside to achieve more in a shorter amount of time – for the customers.
Then, it depends on how strong the CEO's leadership skills really are, how quick she/he can change an organization. That requires of course to be able to inspire and to lead the V-level in a way that they are all working in the same direction - backwards from the customer - and that they design and implement the idea of collaboration also in the internal organization.
No silos and empires, but collaboration is required, a change to think, feel and work from the outside to the inside, backwards from the customer, not the other way around. That's why the customer as design point is so important.
Then, it's mission critical how well an organization can bridge between strategy and execution. The most successful organizations know exactly how to do that...

The premise of your answer Alex is that the leadership (CEO) must be the one to ask the right questions.

I don't necessarily disagree, however if leadership is schooled in a certain mindset (lets say very sales minded and marketing is just branding and advertising), would they understand that they should be asking these specific questions in the first place ?

As this has been an "issue" for many years, and current times are now forcing more collaboration and focus on return, are current leaders with their past experience always aware of the current and future changes ahead and the need to ask these questions ?

I'll differentiate between "facilitating collaboration" and "creating alignment". I'll also point out that there are varying degrees of collaboration, whereas you're either aligned or your are not...there's really no such thing as "almost aligned" as that's the definition of misalignment.

We're all striving or alignment, and alignment is cultural. Two organizations can have alignment without agreement, ie., sales and marketing may not completely agree on how a particular process should be structured, but they can still be aligned. How so? A position of authority over both functions (CEO or otherwise), insists on the alignment. S/he can insist on alignment on her own accord, or she can arrive at that position through the presentation of data to support the alignment. Either way, I think that should be the real focus - getting executive leadership to understand the value of alignment.

Hopefully you all find yourselves in a culture where Sales and Marketing stand a fighting chance to become aligned, otherwise, the change in leadership that's necessary may be YOU leaving to seek such a culture!

Let me open this up and bit and submit to the group that leadership is one of many possible root causes to the lack of Marketing and Sales alignment. As Carlos points out, there are other possible underlying causes. These underlying problems will be different for different businesses and will shift over time as the business climate evolves.

Marketing and Sales alignment should really be approached as an engine that drives an organization's commercial efficiency. Those things which reduce alignment reduce our commercial efficiency. So, we can't focus on one problem. Rather, we need to bring out the Six Sigma toolbox, identify root causes, pareto those into the most impactful (negative or positive impact) on Marketing and Sales alignment, and then purposefully and systematically go about improvment.

So, if we see lack of Marketing and Sales alignment as a headwind to commercial efficiency, we can begin a purposeful deeper dive into the causes and effective continuous improvement in these areas year-over-year.