Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams Aligned?

Your company probably has an experienced sales team and a separate marketing team. And if they’re like most sales and marketing functions, they’re likely in constant combat. The marketing team is producing leads and sales materials, and the sales team often questions the value of their contribution. Both teams point fingers at the other instead of working together to produce profitable revenue for the organization — what we’re referring to as Revenue Generation.

In the meantime, your company’s revenue growth is flat and margins are shrinking. Whether you realize it or not, you’re drastically overpaying for results.

Companies who solve this problem can remove 10-15 points of cost while driving their top line to generate predictable results.

Revenue Generation is a C-Level Strategy

Let’s say your corporate strategy is to generate $40 million in revenue this year. Armed with that corporate strategy, it’s time to develop a Revenue Generation strategy that says, OK, we need to plan to generate $45 million. Here is a clear vision of that $45 million strategy, including the markets and niches that we will strategically dominate and the particular offers we will sell into those niches.

Once you have a Revenue Generation strategy, you can create the structure and processes to support it. You might say, okay, how much of the $45 million will come through channels? How much is direct sales? What kind of marketing programs will we need to fill the pipeline? How full does the pipeline need to be? Are we filling our direct pipeline or our channel partners’ pipeline? What metrics will we use to make sure everything works?

At that point, you need to align your entire organization to deliver on that Revenue Generation strategy. It’s not the responsibility of your sales team or your marketing team. It’s the responsibility of the entire organization, working together, to execute that strategy.

For this reason, Revenue Generation should be treated as a C-level strategy, and it needs to permeate your entire organization.

Revenue Generation is About:

• Defining a revenue focus in your culture
• Developing an aligned strategy (corporate and revenue) that runs through the office of the CEO to every corner of the organization
• Creating a structure efficiently and consistently execute that aligned strategy
• Implementing best practices to guide the implementation of revenue tactics
• Using metrics to track and adjust with confidence
• Documenting learnings for continuous improvement
• Leading a lifetime of reliable and profitable growth

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