Great stuff from Hunter Hastings on the Reveries site about the challenge of integrating the Marketer’s strategic plan with the Salesforce’s tactics.

Marketers see themselves as developers of strategic business plans and solutions. They also believe that they pass these strategic tools to the salesforce for the latter to deploy in building high quality and high profit customer relationships. But they believe that the salesforce is unable to maintain the quality and intent of the strategy and unable, consequently, to achieve the results of revenue and profit growth the strategy was designed to deliver.

The interaction of cause and effect in this situation is subtle and complex. No survey of the type we conducted could ever make it clear whether the fault lies in the strategic content that doesn’t stand up to the realities of the marketplace, or whether the problem is that salespeople are not sufficiently trained, or supported, or capable to execute the strategies. We do know, however, that the Marketing-Sales Divide is a chasm over which strategic intent can’t jump — at least not in our respondents’ experience to date.

The solution to the problem is seen to lie not in some magic bullet but in collaborative process and organizational change. Brandowners focus on process rather than tools to address the challenge of the Marketing-Sales Divide.

href=”http://www.reveries.com/reverb/essays/cmomemo/”>reveries – hunter hastings – bridging the marketing-sales divide