To change marketing’s impact, you must change marketing’s culture

The key to better sales & marketing alignment isn’t technology or content or more meetings or even shared objectives.  All of these are important, but they will fail to deliver results unless you address and impact the most important factor in driving greater sales & marketing success – culture.

Many organizations think of marketing as the arts & crafts department.  The CFO thinks marketing is a cost center.  The sales team thinks your MQL goal isn’t helping them.

Marketing dashboards, filled with clicks and likes and web traffic and retweets, don’t help either.  Managers, instead of aligning interests & activities, argue about who should get credit for opportunities and closed deals.  Your very own marketing team may nod their heads when you talk about sales alignment, but still think their goal is to generate the lowest-cost lead.  The list goes on and on.

Changing the marketing team’s culture, let alone how sales and marketing work together, can start with intent and nomenclature.  Adopt the CFO’s metrics and language as your own.  Filter new ideas based on potential sales and revenue impact.

Get your team to start thinking daily about customer and business outcomes vs mere marketing tactics. Make the sales team’s objectives your objectives.

It will take time to change your culture, but it starts with how you think, talk and act.