Great discussion today from four different clients about how they are handling relationships between marketing, sales, and service. Seems everyone has their challenges and their strengths.  Alignment is the word of the day, getting everyone to represent the brand consistently to the customer while providing different things and with different objectives / measurements.

One really interesting idea was a company that is doing job shadowing across groups, having marketing folks go on sales calls, sales people ride along on service calls, service people work on a marketing campaign. The comment that stuck with me is “it felt ‘heavy’ when we started, but the results are so positive we are saving time and improving customer satisfaction dramatically on the back end, so it is totally worth it.”