Our team recently asked marketing leaders about their experiences with sales and marketing messaging misalignment.
Every leader was aware of the prevalence of the misalignment, but unable to effect change. Leaders expressed frustration that messaging misalignment continued to happen again and again, and at their inability to show ROI for marketing efforts.
In our research, we found that much of the established advice for marketing leaders about alignment suggests focusing on shared goals and KPIs, lead quality and handoff, and better communication between teams.
While important, that advice misses a key component of sales and marketing alignment: consistent and compelling messaging.
Digging deeper to the causes of this messaging misalignment, we discovered five underlying challenges for marketing teams:
- The sales team doesn’t understand marketing’s messaging so they can’t confidently deliver it.
- The sales team is not bought in on the messaging and doesn’t believe it will help them succeed.
- The sales team doesn’t have the right assets to deliver the marketing message across the buying journey.
- The sales team can’t easily customize assets to make them more relevant to a specific buyer.
- The sales team struggles to find the content they need, when they need it, so it never gets used.
We’d love to hear from you — are you feeling those same challenges and which are you currently most focused on solving?
Perhaps more importantly, what other messaging alignment challenges are we missing?