Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

10Align Sales and Marketing to Help Buyers Decide

If you've worked in marketing for more than a decade, chances are you've received an all-too-common internal communication: an invitation to attend an “all-hands” meeting where senior management announces a reorganization of the marketing department. You may have experienced a sense of déjà vu as you heard that a new organizational structure is being implemented to “align our resources and greatly enhance our ability to achieve the company's critical goals and objectives.”

Wait. Didn't you attend a meeting a few years ago announcing the reverse configuration? Or perhaps that one announced a different structural alignment, or even the decision to merge sales and marketing.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Reorganizations are often prompted by shifts in upper-level management, challenging market conditions, or a recent acquisition. But no matter the triggering event, these structural shifts are merely symptomatic of a much bigger and more pervasive problem.

Quite simply, there is widespread concern about the lack of synergy between the marketing and sales organizations. A widely cited 2011 Forrester Research study revealed the sobering fact that 92 percent of business-to-business (B2B) companies report marketing and sales alignment problems. Undoubtedly, this situation is very bad for business, with buyers subjected to conflicting (or entirely irrelevant) strategies to win their business.

Companies have tried to solve ...