The issue of sales and marketing alignment has been floating in the corporate hallways for several years now. What I am finding most interesting is that the definitions surrounding the "sales & marketing alignment" conundrum are, to use the proverbial expression, all over the map. What prompted me to think about this was Dave Stein's post, Marketing's Knowledge of Salespeople, on his Commentary on Sales Leadership blog. The main tenet of his post is best said by Dave:
"What’s going on is that many CEOs, COOs, GMs, and other executives haven’t figured out that sales and marketing alignment is more about culture, philosophy and business orientation than it is about marketing providing sales with leads, marketing messages and sexy product brochures and sales selling enough so everyone, especially those in marketing, gets to keep their jobs."
I am sure some will find this to be quite a provocative statement. One thing I can say is that there have been many undertones in recent webinars, blog posting, and articles about this gap in culture. I use undertone because most of the discussions seems to be around marketing "placating" sales with leads and getting them to make more money - without really addressing what lies underneath the gap. Yes, sales wants these things and marketing is more than happy to oblige because they need to see successes in their product marketing strategies.
Dave's point that the gap is best defined through culture, philosophy, and business orientation gets to another crucial point. That is, that these three variables create different prisms or lenses by which marketing and sales views the customer. Marketing and sales, through their divergent cultures, can wind up with vastly different views of the customer. The next time you are in a meeting with marketing and sales representation, perk up your ears and listen to the conversational tennis match of "what I think the customer wants" literally bouncing off the walls of the conference room. Like Dave, I served as a VP in both sales and marketing. The adjustment to the "culture" of each was pronounced. What is unfortunate is that the gap has created an environment whereby each area doesn't garner a high opinion of each. And both claim that the "other side" just doesn't "get it."
How do we get sales and marketing to see through the same lenses and have a common view of the customer? Buyer Personas offers the opportunity to create this common view and become the bridge that soars over the raging cultural waters running below. Buyer Personas are archetypal or fictional representations of a company's buyer. They are grounded in qualitative field work that helps to create a common view of goals, issues, motivators, needs, and insight. More importantly, once they are created, they introduce the much needed objectivity into the discussions about customers.
By creating and using buyer personas, organizations can begin to see real gains in the effectiveness of marketing and sales strategies. Why? Buyer personas can achieve alignment around a common view of the buyer. One of the most influential books I have ever read was The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. In it, the author has a chapter about how to place a hotly contested issue in the middle of the conference room and create objectivity. Buyer Personas offers a very tangible and literal way to make this happen. Placing the buyer persona(s) in the middle of the conference room is an effective way to introduce objectivity and to have the focal point be about the common view of the customer. This elevates the cultural and business orientation strengths of each area to a complementary level.
Creating buyer personas is not as easy as it may sound and I cannot certainly give it the full treatment in this post. Today, we are seeing smart thinking organizations that are now training and staffing buyer persona experts in their marketing and sales groups who can steer each department towards this common view of the customer. These buyer persona experts truly offer the potential to bring to life the voice of the customer in a way that has not been achieved before.
