I wrote a blog piece a while back that suggested that the new role for the CMO should be to drive BOTH organizational and technological change. And I believe this. You need to make things happen, but you need to have the back-up so you can scale, repeat and efficiently operate, while still having time to focus on and understand constantly-changing priorities.

FYI, that piece is at: http://propellingbrands.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/a-cmo%e2%80%99s-dual-imperatives-%e2%80%93-driving-organizational-and-technological-change/

The inherent conflict here is that sales is a one-to-one, and sales expects marketing to support them one-to-one. The way we attacked this 20 years ago was to ignore what happens on the street and just build ‘big brands’ – a la Mad Men. But we’re all wise that that doesn’t work — especially with B2B marketing. The good news is that new systems give us the architecture to be able to support one-to-one and lead-level marketing on a massive scale.

Also, thanks for the link. I will check out that discussion thread and participate with some comments.

@ George – Internal communication – as you cite – is, in fact, the greatest tool we have for addressing mis-alignment.

Great ideas, guys. Thanks for the insights.

The constant struggle of sales and marketing for hegomony is something that I have been leading a discussion on recently. In my view, perfect alignment rarely exists in organisations because:

1) Neither side invests the time to understand the other

2) Marketing in its broadest definition is too big a role for one person or department and hence marketing is often seen only as ’sales support’.

3) Marketers don’t invest in their own leadership skills and hence rarely get to a level within an organisation where they have the mandate they aspire to.

Marketing doesn’t have to bow down or vindicate itself to Sales, but it does have to justify itself to the board in a language and measures the board understands. The key is firstly to identify those measures and then to align the marketing strategy and plan to them. A functional board will see that these should extend beyond short-term sales performance.

My discussion for anybody that is interested is here http://bit.ly/oPBlb

And it has to be collaborative. It’s critical as a marketer to see things from the sales point of view, but it also is critical for sales to see things from a marketing point of view.

@ Wendy – Your insights are very thoughtful interesting to hear. There are different roles being played, but I also would submit that some of the traditional approaches to marketing — as with any business science — need to evolve.

I think one of the major transitions — and this is something technology can help change our take on — is moving marketing’s role from being in the business of one to many communication to mass one-to-one communication. We need to be more sophisticated than ever about our targeting and close-in support of sales. And our marketing communication needs to adopt the voice of sales.

We also need to shift our stance — from one of a strictly proactive nature to one of a forward thinking but reactive nature. What do I mean by this? With a buyer driving the purchase, we’ve got to anticipate their needs and be ready to respond, but ultimately that needs to be a communication interchange initiated by buyer. It’s a new posture that requires a new approach I have talked about in past presentations as being ‘dynamic’ and iterative campaigns, versus traditional static campaigns.

where am I going with this? I agree that there are different roles and points of view. You’re totally right, but I also think that we need to be open to shifting those roles and points of view and that this is going to be a critical component of improving he effectiveness of the go-to-market process.

Great dialogue! Thanks for jumping in.

A comment on your comment… you say, “Sales and Marketing alignment will be achieved when they are two roles in a single end-to-end process.” It’s a mighty big process — marketing supports sales but also has to create brand recognition. Marketing has to create messages that appeal to a broad market; sales has to communicate the messages that will resonate at the client level, showing how the solution will meet individual client needs.

There were a few years in my career where I got a lot of requests (I was a product marketing manager for a tech firm) where I was asked to create sales tools for specific client situations — usually in the form of a specific feature/function sheet or a competitive checklist.

It was frustrating — I was trying to provide the info/tools that sales needed, but most of it seemed to just miss the mark.

We finally figured it out. We made sure we understood how marketing supported the sales process by clearly delineating the objectives and metrics for brand, lead gen, field and product marketing. And we invested in an excellent sales training program — ValueSelling. Sales, marketing and product management went through the training and we finally were all on the same page.

But it’s not just the process that needs to be on the same page; it’s the taxonomy and terminology. If I am in marketing and I send sales a “qualified lead,” we better agree on what “qualified” means.

I think you and I probably agree that we might be able to really get to a single end-to-end process, but we need to recognize that sales and marketing have different objectives and goals over the course of the process, and that makes it more difficult to pull it off. And maybe more fun.

Though my role does not require Marketing per se, I have a close proximity to some day-to-day Marketing activities. The aspect of this exposure I have found most intriguing is the relationship between Marketing and Sales. It has been interesting, to say the least, and reminds me of the “us and them” relationship between IT and the business organizations they support.

Given what I have witnessed, your post if very thoughtful and insightful. If I could be so bold as to offer my advice, though it comes from an admittedly pedestrian Marketing view:

Sales and Marketing alignment will be achieved when they are two roles in a single end-to-end process.

This is something that has occurred to me in my short time in Marketing. I am just using your post to throw it out there.

Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist

http://community.ca.com/blogs/theitgovernanceevangelist/