Why Sales and Marketing Alignment is Like Golf

Last night my husband and I watched our DVR recording of The Haney Project's new season featuring Ray Romano. In this series Ray Romano is seeking the help of golf coach Hank Haney to break through his lowest score to date of 80.

I used to play a lot of golf. I was never great at it, but I love the game. While watching the antics of Ray as he tries to grasp Hank's tips and improve his swing - the commentary is hilarious, as you might expect - I started thinking about why golf is so challenging.

A few things on my list include:

• Too much to do at once - head down, don't dip your shoulder, bend your knees, stay in your swing plane, keep your club face in the right position...and about 90 other things critical to achieving perfection. But only if all done simultaneously.
• The wind can change everything. Even a skillfully hit shot can be taken down by a shift in wind currents. 
• Water is only friendly to ducks.
• The rough isn't friendly to anyone.
• Trees. Why?
• Bunkers - just in case you haven't had enough fun already...

Yes, there are a lot of obstacles in golf. Lot's of things that can stop you from getting the ball onto the green and into the cup.

Golf has a lot in common with the B2B marketing-to-sales process.

Marketing tees it up and takes a swing. The more they know about the course (buyer's) and the conditions surrounding it (buyer's needs), the more forward progress they can make. If they take a misstep and hit the ball out of bounds, they must return to take a drop and start again. When marketing gets the ball on/near the green, sales takes over to execute the short game with as few additional strokes (sales calls) as possible. 

The lower the handicap, the shorter the sales cycle.

Anyone who's spent much time watching Phil Mickelson over the years knows what happens when there are issues with hitting the long shots or in the short game. It's getting the two consistent that produces a champion—and that takes a lot of practice, coordination and highly-tuned skill. 

When marketing and sales are working both ends of the game without collaborating on what works, tuning the transitions and eliminating obstacles, their results will be much worse than Ray's best score.

What golfers learn about the course on the way to the green plays into their efforts to sink the putt. If they can read the course well, they need less shots to finish out the hole. It takes practice and the honing of skills needed for every shot of the game to improve your score.

What handicap would you give your marketing-to-sales alignment efforts?

Comments

[Emily Mayfield]

Great Post, Ardath. As a golfer, I completely identify. The great and terrible part of the game is that you must constantly be refining and can never really achieve perfection, which also rings true with b2b marketing. I think you summed it beautifully in your first bullet point, in both b2b marketing and golf, there is so much to do at once. Practice and Refinement is the only way to succeed in the game.

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks, Emily! You hit the nail on the head with practice and refinement. Things change so fast that we have to keep testing our assumptions to make sure we shift in step with our markets.

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[John Bottom]

I love the analogy. I would add that the idea of 'muscle memory' gives us another parallel.

In a good golf swing, you need to make certain things instinctive - ie commit them to muscle memory, so you can reproduce the same swing, time after time without thinking about it. That then allows you to focus your thoughts on your game strategy, not your swing. I think marketers need a level of instinct in the same way - the best-practice basics must be ingrained to allow a good marketer to react to variables.

Nice post - as always - thanks for posting