Sales and Marketing alignment – SMarketing – is not enough!

I get it.

Sales & Marketing need to align.

Naturally.

But enough already.

Every organisational division needs to align.

If Finance doesn’t align with Manufacturing – we won’t have the cash to build stuff. But if they align in the “wrong way” (ie share poor raw materials forecast, share poor cashflow forecasts) – we’ll go broke!

If HR doesn’t align with the Board – the inmates will run the asylum!

Sales & Marketing have to align – but not to align only to both go over the cliff like lemmings! We can plan together, go out on calls together, share technologies, share KPIs – but what if we’re not aligning to the right cause?!

Let’s not forget the key stakeholder here. It’s not Sales nor Marketing – it’s the Buyer!

Buyers have changed how they buy, even over the last 5 years. Sales & Marketing can align all they like – but they also need to align with the new buyer’s journey.

Our experience is that different types of content – aligned to the buyer’s journey – is useful for attracting and nurturing prospects.

Marketing can build the content – and indeed use simple yet sophisticated marketing automation systems to attract buyers with their content, irrespective of where the buyer is on their buying journey (even if they haven’t started a buyer journey!).

By gauging where the buyer is on their journey – they can pass this information on to Sales, and this will help Sales to know the best way of selling to the buyer!

This is helpful – but automated content marketing helps organisations to “market while they sleep”, having “always on marketing” to help Sales by moving buyers along 24x7x365.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be writing more blogs – and releasing white papers – to practically illustrate how modern marketing automation/content delivery & nurturing systems can simply and practically generate qualified leads for Sales.