8 Challenges Of Sales And Marketing Alignment

Overcome These Challenges to Delight Your Buyer from First Touch to Close

As blatantly obvious as it sounds, Sales and Marketing alignment is beyond critical for any organization. According to the Aberdeen Group, 74% of best-in-class organizations have a strong relationship between Sales and Marketing. So why is such common knowledge often hard to act on – let alone perfect?

There are many roadblocks that inhibit Sales and Marketing from achieving true alignment. These two teams that have the same stated goals – generating revenue and staying true to the buyer – often find themselves misaligned as they work towards the same end. Marketing may feel like Sales is not correctly utilizing the content they are creating, and Sales may feel like

Marketing isn’t creating the right kind of materials. Often times the technologies each department utilize – CRMs for Sales and MAPs for Marketing – don’t offer enough vital insights into every interaction. The means by which each department attempts to reach their goal differ, but in reality their efforts can be aligned to improve results and boost productivity.

Marketing works to create, distribute, and deliver content that will engage buyers at every stage of their journey. Sales must be equipped and prepared for every buyer interaction, send the right content, and successfully move buyers from the beginning stages of their journey to a closed deal. Viewed through the right lens, these objectives are flip sides of the same coin.

An imperative function of both Marketing and Sales needs to be the recognition and acknowledgement that they are working towards the same goal. The problems each department faces may seem unique, but in reality they are more similar than dissimilar. The solutions that exist for a problem in one team often solve a problem on the other side of the aisle. To illustrate that let’s take a look at four challenges facing Marketing and four challenges facing Sales.