A Successful Blueprint That Leads to Higher Marketing Results

For marketing managers new to a company or planning facilitators desiring a fresh blueprint for guiding strategic planning sessions, the idea of marketing convergence may be a godsend.

Bridging silos and fostering collaboration between sales and marketing in the planning process can lead to higher sales, more qualified customer leads, a broader understanding of the customer, and deeper market intelligence.

"Sales and marketing alignment starts with giving both teams common goals. While the two teams’ jobs will always be different, they need to have shared high-level goals that lead to pipeline and revenue targets." 5 Strategies for Successful Marketing and Sales Alignment - American Marketing Association

Traditionally, marketing was given the task of developing awareness and interest in products and brands through mass communications and direct marketing. Sales had the job of finding and qualifying leads and turning “interest” into “consideration” and finally to a “purchase.”

Today, data-driven marketing goes further in qualifying prospects through lead-generation marketing programs that can cultivate prospects to reach the “Evaluation” level where sales can take over.

More robust and customer centric marketing that helps drive sales to the purchase decision does not diminish the role of sales. It helps maximize their efficiency by providing warmer and more qualified leads.

At Marketing Convergence Solutions, our comprehensive marketing planning process helps those charged with marketing planning and facilitators engage in a more systematic approach by aligning sales and marketing, establishing agreement among stakeholders, and executing a structured planning procedure.

The outcome is a well-crafted marketing plan encompassing objectives, strategies, and tactics meeting customer requirements while generating more customer leads and incremental revenue.

A Complete Marketing Convergence Planning Process Now Available

Our planning process offers step-by-step instructions, training, examples, and prompts on how to align sales and marketing resources and people to build a strategic marketing plan designed to generate incremental revenue and customer leads. The planning package includes:

• Facilitator’s guidebook, training, and instructions

• Interactive worksheet forms for building the Situation Analysis, Pre-planning Meeting, Tactics – Best Practices, Marketing Plan, Executive Summary, and the Final Marketing Plan

• Customizable PowerPoint presentation to help the facilitator guide planning meeting discussions

• Examples of how marketing objectives, strategies, and tactics should be written, structured, and organized to clearly show what the plan aims to accomplish and how results will be measured

Who Should Use a Marketing Convergence Approach

Anyone involved with marketing and wanting their plans to deliver measurable and quantifiable results should consider marketing convergence planning. Marketing planners, facilitators, marketing and sales managers, advertising managers and agency account managers, business owners and other stakeholders can find this approach useful in developing results driven marketing.

Want More Marketing Convergence Ideas?

Go to Marketing Convergence Solutions for more practical ways to align sales and marketing to help you strategically generate more sales, leads, and customer loyalty.

A preview of the guidebook is available here.