Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Toward a More Harmonious and Productive Relationship

It’s not an easy task to encourage marketing and sales to communicate better, let alone see eye-to-eye and truly collaborate. But devoting time and attention to achieving this goal is far more than just a nice thing to do. It is imperative, and can be a major competitive advantage for your company, particularly since so few businesses get it right.

Jim Dickie, Managing Partner with CSO Insights, a research and consulting firm that specializes in helping companies improve marketing and sales alignment, sums up the problem this way: “I’m still shocked at the number of companies which do not even have a formally agreed-upon definition of what [makes a lead] sales-ready. The marketing team has its definition of what is marketing-ready. And the sales department has its own point of view on what constitutes a real opportunity. But there is typically a significant disconnect between the differing views, and that carries forward into continuous conflict at the boundary between marketing and sales.”

The chapters ahead will outline a bold strategy for fundamentally transforming the sales-marketing relationship. It is an epic journey. But even the longest march starts with a single step. So to get you started, here are four small steps you can take that will point your marketing and sales teams in the right direction:

• Focus on value delivered. Educate marketing and sales team members on each other’s contributions to your company’s short- ...