Neil Rackham: Aligning Sales & Marketing

As I pointed out in "Why Your Marketing Isn't Effective", marketing groups that become too "strategic" just waste time and money. I have great pleasure in pointing out that sales uber-guru Neil Rackham basically agrees with me, as shown in this clip where he's being interviewed by Gerhard Gschwandtner, the publisher of SellingPower magazine.

Rackham also endorses -- perhaps in more kindly terms that I typically use -- the notion that marketing groups need to be refocused on generating qualified leads (which he calls "opportunities".) This is a great video that really contains a lot of basic sales wisdom.

Here's a quick summary of what Neil said:

How the disconnect happens:

• Organizations begin with sales but no marketing.
• Marketing starts as a sales support function.
• Marketing then becomes "atmospheric" and "strategic".
• Marketing loses the ability to communicate with sales.

• Sales says marketing gives us bad leads.
• Marketing says sales doesn't follow up on leads.
• There's no common definition of a good lead.
• There's no differentiation between a lead and an opportunity.

• Appoint a "Chief Revenue Officer" who owns both sales and marketing.
• Define an opportunity as a lead that will easily convert to a customer.
• Jointly define which leads are real opportunities.
• Refocus marketing on generating opportunities.
• Create a collaborative, gradual handover from marketing to sales.
• Create gates through which leads are eliminated as "non-opportunities."

Full Disclosure: I write for SellingPower magazine, the producers of this video,
which also has a distribution agreement with BNET for video content.