Aligned to Achieve

Chapter 7Cracking the Code of Alignment

As we've mentioned a few times throughout this book, we conducted a detailed survey of nearly 1,000 sales and marketing professionals to uncover the real reasons behind our misalignment. Some of the findings confirmed our hunches and others really surprised us. We found miscommunication and misconceptions are the top two reasons for misalignment, but digging deeper, we found even more disconnects. Let's review our motivation for conducting this research.

Both of us have always believed sales and marketing should be talking to each other more. Once we were well into our own alignment transition, we believed we should be talking more about sales and marketing. We had our own opinions and, because InsideView sells to both sales and marketing, they gave us the opportunity to see how the two teams interact and communicate across all different customer types, company sizes, industries, and segments. What we heard usually confirmed our assumptions, but we wanted to be sure.

Getting the sentiment of an entire market takes work, but we thought it would allow us to see the basics. It would uncover the Alignment 101 items—communication, collaboration, and metrics—that would take us out of our echo chamber where alignment was always great and ground us with what real professionals are actually thinking and feeling. Sometimes you just have to ask some questions to gauge if what you think you know is really what's happening.

We've experienced firsthand ...