Aligning Sales and Marketing in a Rapidly Evolving Market

By Ian McManis, Barnes Dennig

When it comes to innovation by sales collaboration, the ideal goal is perfect alignment. Improving the understanding of who your target market is, and how to enhance interaction between marketing and sales, is the key to speeding up the sale cycle.

In a past AAMplify! podcast series with Chuck Ludmer, CMO of Cohn Reznick, we dove into the intricacies between the traditional sales model and how to re-tune for 2017 and beyond.

Ludmer has held various roles in the accounting field, passing the original CISA exam, and working his way up to become the chief marketing and practice development officer at CohnReznick LLP, a national accounting tax and advisory firm based out of New York City.

Along his journey through the industry, Ludmer has witnessed the evolution of sales from a traditional personal networking model, into a much more in-depth decision and knowledge driven process.

“In the past, sales was simply knowing your network, and working through relationships. But today, we need to focus more on the buyer and the decision making ability that they carry,” says Ludmer.

Today’s buyers are more informed than in any period of the accounting industry. They know what it is that they need and have more than one place to get it. Differentiation has become the key piece of positioning that today’s business developers need to be aware of. Marketing teams work to give buyers all of the information that they need to make a purchasing decision, and it falls to the sales team to pull it all together.

Ludmer states that the most effective sales teams need to be constantly challenging themselves to learn and understand the tactics that marketers are employing in the marketplace. This transition from relying on personal networks and brand to focusing on lead generation will fuel accounting growth for years to come.

Sales teams that have figured out the right way to leverage marketing campaigns and tactics and the content that engages today’s new buyer persona will have the competitive advantage:

“Technology is evolving at such a pace that we need to be constantly innovating, and in order to best utilize these technologies, sales and marketing need to be aligned,” says Ludmer.

In conclusion, sales collaboration innovation is more about the shift in how your marketing and sales teams interact with one another than it is setting sales and marketing goals. Take a step back and analyze all of the tools at your sales and marketing team’s disposal, then figure out how your teams can work together to identify your most valuable targets, and the best way to differentiate yourself to them in a well-educated, and fast-changing market.

About AAMplify!

A podcast from the Association for Accounting Marketing, AAMplify! is full of short, single topic discussions provided in an easily digestible format. Topics range from strategy and management to digital marketing to business development. Listeners can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes, Stitcher or YouTube.