It still amazes me that sales and marketing (mis-)alignment is so reminescent of the cold war. A much better approach to this is mutual understanding and workig on the problem.

Achieving sales/marketing alignment all boils down to a four-step process:

One, both parties need to recognize they have a common goal — i.e., closing business — and that must be focused around the buyer and his/her process. The B2B buyer is changing, and the time is right to understand this and to make sure your sales and marketing practices are re-aligning.

I touched on this on my guest blog piece on this site on Monday:

http://blog.reachforce.com/sales-and-marketing-tips/what-is-silverpop-engage-b2b-%E2%80%93-marketing-automation-who%E2%80%99s-who/

Two, both parties need to recognize their roles are changing — driven by a changing buyer. This re-education is critical and could help not only marketing improve productivity, but also sales.

Three, both parties need a common language for talking about the process of generating, nurturing and closing leads — lead scoring — as you highlight above.

Four, both partnes need to work toward a repeatable lead management process built on these principles — rather than just a recurring gripe session.

To get going, you need to ‘break the ice’ in this cold war, and we hope humor is one way to do that — hence the title and tenor of the paper.

Thanks, again, for the review and thoughts on this.