Connecting the Marketing Message with the Sales Conversation

I recently recorded an on-demand webinar with BrightTALK on the increasingly important need to connect your marketing messages with the conversations your sales people are having with prospects and customers in the field.

You can watch the webinar here, but I thought you might find it interesting if I shared a few of the points made in the webinar in this article - and offered some recommendations. Here goes:

Why is sales and marketing alignment so important anyway? Here are a couple of compelling reasons:

• Highly aligned organisations grow over 30% faster than companies with disconnected sales and marketing teams
• In highly aligned organisations, marketing generates more than three times the pipeline value than in laggards

What are the key foundations of alignment? Here are my 4 recommendations, plus a bonus suggestion:

1. Agree on what an ideal customer looks like
2. Identify with your key stakeholders
3. Target your prospect's actionable issues
4. Articulate a clear, consistent value proposition

And my bonus suggestion? Cut out all the self-serving gobbledygook, techno-babble and buzzword b******t. It does nothing to set you apart, and your prospects can smell it from a mile away.

Armed with that foundation, how can you better align the marketing message with the sales conversation in practice? I guess you'll have to watch the webinar to find out ;-)