Keep Both Oars in the Water - Your Marketing Plans Depend on It

Strategic Plans Developed Solely by Marketing Can Be Like Rowing a Boat with One Oar – Going in Circles and Never Reaching Your Destination.

It can be extremely difficult to directly correlate increased sales and customer growth because traditional marketing is mostly designed to improve and measure increased impressions, higher brand awareness, and improved customer satisfaction. However, by converging sales and marketing in the marketing planning process, more highly “destination-focused” marketing plans can be designed to create benchmarks to show how the sales needle moves.

I worked for many years with several category-leading industrial equipment manufacturers, developing marketing plans and programs to help their dealer bases succeed in marketing their products. My experience has always shown me that aligning sales and marketing functions in the planning process is the most effective, comprehensive, and customer-centric approach.

Including sales team members to the marketing planning process would give invaluable input and a “reality check” to the discussions. Short of testing, salespeople were able to highlight which marketing efforts or promotions would generate the most interest or what messages would resonate best with customers. Additionally, they were able to warn if marketing ideas or messaging would possibly be perceived by customers in a negative light.

An expression we often used during planning was, “Make sure the dogs will eat the dog food.” Meaning the dog food may look and smell great, but if the dogs won’t eat it, the best marketing in the world won’t save it.

Marketing and sales collaboration in planning can help ensure that their synergized efforts lead to campaigns that are measurable and improve customer satisfaction.

Collaboration also allows marketing teams to help identify the best potential leads by understanding how or if they can be converted and moved down the sales funnel. This insight helps in crafting more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

Combining the knowledge and insights from both sales and marketing helps lead to more comprehensive strategy development. Sales teams bring customer-facing experience, while marketing teams contribute a deeper market perspective, resulting in the formation of stronger objectives, strategies, and tactics.

Sales and marketing often have different perspectives, but aligning their objectives through collaboration ensures they are working toward common goals. This alignment reduces conflicts, enhances teamwork, and improves overall efficiency.

"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

The Convergence Strategic Planning Process

Sales and Marketing Teams Must “Buy-in” to the Process

For an aligned planning process to be successful, sales and marketing planning team members must” buy-in” to and then participate in a facilitated, collaborative, and exercise-based planning process.

I have found from working with sales teams that many salespeople sometimes look on marketing as “squishy” and maybe not always grounded in reality. What better way, then, to dispel misconceptions than to get sales and marketing on the same page, developing marketing plans jointly.

Sales and marketing functions can bring disparate skills and intelligence to the planning.

Role of Sales in Planning: Share SQL data (Sales Qualified Leads) and insights from their CRM system, first-hand customer knowledge, and other resources.

Role of Marketing in Planning: Lend their expertise with messaging, MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads), promotions, and communications knowledge and skills.

Then together, they develop marketing objectives and strategies that are better aligned to reach current customers, find new customers, and generate incremental revenue.

Don’t Leave the Planning to “Planners”

A mis-step companies sometimes make is leaving the marketing planning process entirely up to “professional marketing planners,” whether on staff or brought in for the purpose of planning. They may have their place in adding structure and organization to the planning process, but actionable input must come from people in the organization closest to the customer, especially the sales teams.

Convergence Planning Is a “Win-Win.”

Marketing planning using convergence techniques can be a “win-win” for both sales and marketing functions.

Marketing professionals can develop and implement highly targeted and measurable marketing solutions that can directly affect sales growth. Sales teams end up with more highly motivated customers and qualified leads that are nearer to the purchase decision.

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.

An available marketing convergence strategic planning guidebook and fillable form worksheets provide steps and processes on how to assemble the right planning team, create assignments, facilitate the planning, and use the power of both individual and group thinking to develop a strategic marketing plan that delivers the desired results. A preview of the guidebook is available here.