Aligned to Achieve: How to Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth by Tracy Eiler and Andrea Austin

The Host’s Perspective:

Sales and marketing alignment. To a lot of business people that is some kind of mythical fairy tale land with unicorns, rainbows and leprechauns. Of course, that’s not the case, but one thing sales and marketing alignment does have is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

According to SiriusDecisions, when sales and marketing teams are aligned they are averaging 19 percent faster revenue growth and 15 percent higher profitability. That’s why sales and marketing alignment is not some nice to have, feelgood corporate kumbaya.  It’s a requirement for faster, more profitable growth.

The co-authors of the book are the Chief Marketing Officer and the VP of Enterprise Sales at InsideView a software as a service company. They have worked at companies where sales and marketing were aligned, and at companies where they were not aligned, and saw how counterproductive and less profitable that approach was.

So why do companies with sales and marketing alignment have faster growth and higher profitability?  It’s because the way your customers buy has changed dramatically.  In the past when your customers were researching the solution to a problem and a possible purchase they had to contact the seller early on the process in order to get information. At that point, the seller could guide (or strongarm) the buyer along toward a purchase.

The internet has changed that – now customers prefer to educate themselves online and hold off on contacting the seller until as late as possible. Because of that, sales needs more help from marketing, particularly with content, to help guide the buyer through their process.

As the authors say repeatedly in the book, “sales can’t do it alone and marketing exists to make it easier.”

In the book, Eiler and Austin walk you through granular details of how to achieve greater sales and marketing alignment through four lenses: 1) leadership, 2) culture, 3) process, and 4) technology. And knowing that the secret of getting ahead is getting started, the authors conclude each chapter with the first things that you should do about that chapter to get the ball rolling.

Sales and marketing alignment is no longer a fairly tale, but evidence shows that there is in fact a pot of gold at the end of the process once you start heading in that direction.

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