Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment
According to CSO Insights 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Survey of more then 2800 Chief Sales Officers (CSO's), the single most important initiative to help CSO's achieve their #1 goal of improving lead generation is Sales and Marketing Alignment.
Sales and Marketing Alignment captures domain knowledge, product usage & company knowledge, sales knowledge along with proof points and solution summaries. These are generated are used directly in sales conversations and blogging around target buyer issues.
The Survey's authors strongly recommend top priority be given to Sales and Marketing Alignment as it is the easiest to do, with the lowest cost to implement and results in the highest impact on the organization.
There are several elements to sales and marketing alignment, we will start with Messaging Alignment. Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment is a process which produces the following:-
- Understanding buyer persona (stakeholder) goals, needs, industry issues and typical problems faced by different stakeholders and the impact of those if issues if unresolved,
- Aligning marketing messaging around relevant product capabilites that help buyers achieve goals and thus create value for the buyer,
- Creating Buyer-Relevant Messaging Templates to align sales conversations with specific buyers persona's around their goals problems and needs, and how products can be used to create value.
The first step in improving lead generation and marketing performance is to thoroughly understand the needs and likely areas of interest of your target audience. This may sound obvious, but most Websites are inwardly focused on product and service features instead of engaging interested visitors around their issues.
When we truly understand the needs of our target buyers, we are in much stonger position to engage the buyer in conversations about their issues, which in turn enables us to create differentiation in the mind of the buyer
