Inbound marketing is like sitting at the bar putting out your mojo while waiting for an attractive person to start a conversation with you. Outbound marketing is like approaching an attractive person and starting a conversation.

Round Canoe Syndrome is a metaphor for what happens in a misaligned organization. Left untreated, it’s deadly.

Product-market fit is less like two puzzle pieces and more like two piles of LEGOs. Mix-and-match to make a unique and flexible pairing.

Commercial teams benefit from clearly understanding three things…who the customers are, why the customers care about you, and how customers want to engage with you. Always.

Do the math on what a misaligned team is costing the company. Results vary by team, but consider this scenario.

One might think “we don’t do that here.” In fact, it’s impossible NOT to have done sales, marketing, and product development if you have at least one customer.

Best-in-class outbound marketing campaigns can still be epic fails and qualify as “horrible marketing”

Are you ready for some Football?  Think of your professional business team this way…

What if ROI (Return on Investment) and similar indicators of value are only smokescreens to protect the buyer from harm if things don’t work out? Afterall, decisions don’t demand a demonstrable ROI.

When you want to find a bear, look in the woods.

Sir Isaac Newton may have applied his three laws of motion to business as follows.  Law 1: A business at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by a crisis.  Law 2: A change in momentum requires forces and time.  Law 3: For every metric there is an equal and opposite counter metric.

There are three truths about market share:

1) A company can have at most 100% market share of its uniquely identified niche

2) A company has 0% market share of customers that don’t buy from it

3) Any other market share metric is a misleading estimate

Getting someone to 1) recognize, 2) admit to, and 3) do something about a problem are among the most difficult things to do.  There are important implications.

Erik Host-Steen, Founder of SMP Alignment, shares his best practices for aligning your sales and marketing teams. From effective handoffs to qualified leads and using technology to smooth out the process, Erik talks about how to get your sales and marketing departments to work together.  Link to the podcast here.