Sales-marketing alignment is key to business success beyond any doubt. The partnership is the necessary “bad”, under extreme pressure the easiest thing to blame each other.
Let we start with the marketers’ cognitive distortions and their consequences.
For a marketer sometimes it’s so annoying to work with sales people. Stubborn, demanding persons keep on asking. Sales force represents a most mysterious logical trap:
- Sales people are really dependent like lambs – never know what to do, they are always asking for instructions and contents.
- Sales people always think they know better than marketing what to do.
It’s not surprising that the temptation is huge for a marketer to teach the sales force about who is the boss of the shanty. And the marketing subconscious starts to punish – on various ways.
- Irrelevant content overload
Have they asked for more materials – here they come! Tons of useless unstructured and unorganized presentations and assets…
- Animation everywhere (the more unstoppable is the more better)
Would they like the involve and engage the clients with interactive contents? Interaction is something moving, isn’t it? What else is moving? Animations! Attention: once the presentation is started there’s no chance to stop it.
- No navigation buttons or index
To preserve mental capacity you have the do some memory exercises. What would be a nicer challenge than to remember each slides of a hopelessly long useless presentation without any help? Of course training is needed to do this.
- No training
No content? And does sales people think they are smart? Then why would they need training to know and understand the new materials? But at least they have been informed about the availability of the new assets.
- No notification when a new asset is available
An other cognitive exercise is the attention testing. It’s better to be vigilant – a new content can appear any time without any notice.
- And the cherry on the cake: bind the sales compensation plan to the content usage
Follow these steps and pissed off sales force is guaranteed (but sales and revenue isn’t). But you are in the danger zone – sales force is not unarmed; on return you can expect revenge.