Sales and marketing Alignment: Focus your team on "The Buyer"

Much has been written about the importance of your go-to-market team (sales and marketing) understanding the mind of your client, the buyer, to market and sell successfully. It's all the more important in long and complex sales situations. We all know this to be true.

But there is more to this than meets the eye.

First, not only do you need to understand your buyer, you need to know that they are on a buying journey and if you are to be successful you must match that journey with your own seller's journey and adapt your understanding and subsequent messaging accordingly.

For example, if you are a client at the very beginning of your buying journey you may not even know you have a problem, or you may not have appreciated the impact of that problem on your business. As a seller of solutions to that problem your initial communications would be wildly different from a client who has acknowledged their problem has asked for tenders and is undertaking a formal evaluation of your offer versus your competitors.

"But wait a minute" says your salesperson, "Are you telling me I need to understand my prospect before they even know they have a problem, that's lead generation surely? That's marketing's job!"

Similarly, marketing complains, "We produce thousands of leads to the sales team every year from our campaigns, surely that's our job done, its sales' job to turn them into clients."

Is this all starting to sound horribly familiar? Well the truth of the matter is that many organisations fail to appreciate that to be really effective at lead generation, BOTH the sales and marketing teams need to be fully aligned around the buyers journey right from the beginning of the journey to the end. Both sales and marketing need to be singing off the same song sheet.

Achieving alignment around the buyer's journey requires some smart thinking, planning and technology. Send me a comment if you want to chat more.