Francois at Beeline nails the key issues between Sales and Marketing. Here is an excerpt from his recent coverage of an IDC event:
Only 20% of content produced by marketing gets used by sales. That is a shame and should be corrected, but focusing on that again exposes the mindset of the marketer 1.0 - empowering sales to interrupt and catch that prospect and turn them into a customer. Based on the conversations I heard yesterday nobody seems to be concerned about the percentage of content that actually gets used by prospects. Which brings me back to the first point - the most important conversations are those among your prospects, detractors and customers, not the ones you intend on having with them.... An interrupt-driven Marketing 1.0 world has no leverage points.ONLY 20% - !? ... sorry for yelling but this is a huge problem that I help solve every day. The great thing is that it is remarkably easy to fix. It starts with getting the players to play better together... and that starts with listening to Sales, Marketing, Your Clients/Prospects, and THEIR customers.
Not hard to do. You just have to decide to do it. Not including all these players in the process makes it worthless.