It is not unusual among small and midsize companies for marketing programs to be out of sync with the sales effort. Three misalignments cause this to happen.

1. Leadership doesn’t clearly distinguish between sales and marketing
Sales and marketing departments have different agendas
2. Sales and/or marketing departments have no agenda

Typically, sales objectives are more clearly understood and articulated in small companies than are marketing objectives. This is good news, because the best marketing plan starts with a sales plan. Marketing supports sales and can never be divorced from it. If sales can explain what it wants to accomplish, it becomes fairly simple for marketing to figure out how to support it. Specifically, marketing needs to have a conversation with sales about the following –

• Who is the customer?
• How are we trying to reach the customer — field sales, telesales, the Web, etc.?
• What products and services are we trying to sell them?
• What motivates these customers to buy?
• How is our offering different (features)?
• What makes our offering better (benefits)?
• Who is the competition?
• What is our edge versus the competition?
• What is their edge over us?

Multiple customer types? No problem, just have the same conversation multiple times. When sales and marketing have a meeting of the minds on these issues, a marketing strategy that gives sales what it needs can begin taking shape.

In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about how to overcome the three misalignments that get in the way of effective marketing.