A Spooky Story of Bad Sales and Marketing Alignment

In honor of Halloween, here is a spooky story about what terrible sales / marketing alignment looks like. And it happened in front of the entire company at an All Hands meeting.

Earlier in my career, the marketing team worked hard to assemble a new campaign. We brainstormed for ideas on how to increase visibility in the market. And wow, we had a great concept. I’ve now forgotten even what it was, surprise. We put together plans and decided to announce it internally at our All Hands meeting.

At the meeting, in front of the entire organization, the head of marketing stood up. He walked through the concept in some detail – proudly. He took the applause, and sat down. The marketing team was definitely proud.

Then a senior sales leader stood up. “That might be the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” was roughly what he said. He went on to say how no customer would ever fall for our idea and it was going to completely fall flat.

Well, it already did. We didn’t bother to test it with customers. We didn’t even solicit the opinions of the people that speak to prospects and customers the most, our own sales team. If we’d bothered to get out of our own heads, we would have realized that it wasn’t going to fly in the real world. 

We didn’t know that because we didn’t have a solid relationship with sales. The fact that we got such crushing feedback in such a public place was proof of it. Could that leader have communicated his feedback later in a better way? Could we have solicited opinions from the sellers earlier? Lots of blame to go around.