Hello, we're back, let's now continue to discuss the topic of sales and marketing in strategic misalignment. To get us situated, let's go back and dissect sales and marketing guidelines alignment. First, we looked into the major natures of sales and marketing misalignment, personal, tactical, and strategic. Then, we went on to analyze strategy misalignment, the most problematic one. There are four main kinds, portfolio, positioning, value, and segmentation and targeting. During our last meeting, we approached the first two types of sales and marketing strategic misalignment, portfolio and positioning. Now, let's talk about the value and segmentation and targeting, what do we mean by value? Think of it as a relationship between price versus benefit, benefit divided by price equals value. As a rule, marketers want to go with a price that is higher than what sales wants. Marketing argues that salesmen must sell the benefit, not the price. See, both want to provide value for the client, sales by a lower price, marketing by superior benefits. Proving superior benefit is more complicated than just setting a low price. A price is there for everyone to see, but benefits are mostly intangible, and involve rational and emotional aspects. An example, let's say a customer wants to buy a white shirt to go to a wedding. He's in a shopping mall, and has two options, go to Zara, or go to Hugo Boss. He goes to both stores, and finds that in Zara, this shirt will cost $39.90. Now he goes to Hugo Boss, and there it will cost $195. Both retailers can try to prove value, the Zara salesperson may say that the shirt looks and feels the same as the ridiculously expensive brands. One can buy ten Zara shirts for the price of an Armani one. The Hugo Boss sales person may say that one must go with quality. Zara shirts are 30% synthetic, Hugo Boss is 100% Egyptian cotton. Hugo Boss shirts will be worn for years with no signs of aging, Zara's will last three or four washes only, this is the rational part. Emotionally, the shopper may mention that wearing a Hugo Boss shirt may impress the other guests at said wedding. And they might think he's both sophisticated and rich. This example illustrates the value strategy conflict between marketing and sales. Marketing will insist sales has to sell the benefits. What is more difficult, then, to show that prices are lower than competitors. Now, let's talk about segmentation and targeting conflicts. In an earlier course, we discussed the sales and strategy cycle, where in the planning phase; profiling, segmentation, and targeting was an important step. Segmentation and targeting is about customer or client selection. You're splitting your client universe in segments, each of them with a similar profile. And choosing or targeting the ones with the highest potential to go after. The clash is caused when sales and marketing do not agree if some client has business potential or not. Marketing will give more importance to metrics and hard data to determine the potential of a client. Sales will use more qualitative elements collected on their face to face visits with the client. When their opinions don't coincide, a dysfunctional interaction can occur. If a salesperson wants to include a client to target who is not good in the eyes of marketing, he or she may improve client data. Making it look better regarding metrics, so that they can get an okay from marketing. On the other hand, marketing data may show that the given client has potential, but sales disagrees. Sales, then, may not allocate enough resources to this client, and redirect these resources to other clients. Well, we have explored in great detail the potential issues in aligning sales and marketing guidelines. We have learned everything that can go wrong. Now, how can we tell if sales and marketing are aligned or not? This is going to be the topic for our next meeting, see you then, ciao.