I spoke this morning to a private equity (PE) firm’s gathering of portfolio company CEOs, CROs, and CMOs. Our topic, one of my favorites, was how to get sales and marketing working together to drive business results. While I talked about the predictable subject of alignment, I covered it with an interesting three-level angle (philosophical, strategic, operational). I prefaced the alignment discussion with examples of what typically goes wrong in the sales/marketing relationship, later revealing that I believe most of the commonly-observed “problems” between sales and marketing are, in fact, symptoms of four underlying problems:
- Unrealistic plans
- Function-led mentality
- Blame culture
- Non-alignment
I’ve embedded the presentation below and it’s also available on Slideshare.