Why can’t everyone just play nice? In these days of Brexit, Bezos and somebody named Blake, it seems lots of folks are having trouble getting along. The same is true within companies and organizations, where sales and marketing teams might as well be Burr and Hamilton, sometimes exhibiting a deep-seated sense of mistrust and antipathy that border on cliché.

This classic marketing versus sales clash feels sadly ironic when you consider how closely the two groups mirror each other, especially for home and building brands. With success defined (in many cases) via shared metrics and investment drawn from adjoining budgets, these interrelated disciplines can be like too-close siblings, thus quarrelling becomes second nature.

Sales and marketing may play for the same team, yet it’s no wonder alignment is more the exception than the rule. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Finding common ground can be hard, but it all comes back to the brand. At Wray Ward, we have a deep appreciation for how brands generate alignment in thought and deed. In fact, our work in Insights has the express purpose of bringing clarity to the components or aspects of how a brand is presented and perceived.

Value proposition work, or examining the actions a company takes to create value, is one critical component in gaining alignment. You can think of this work in terms of a brand premise, articulating how every function within the company works together to make the customer feel special.

Defining the brand premise provides the common ground sales and marketing teams need to align their attention and actions. Its power springs from 1) a shared understanding of customers and 2) how the brand creates and consistently delivers value for them.

In our effort to grasp and convey how companies create value behind their brand, we frequently conduct research with sales and marketing stakeholders. Capturing and articulating their own perspectives of how they work to deliver for customers, we inevitably find an innate, shared understanding and commitment to building a powerful brand premise.

So, what’s the moral of this short story? Focus your internal teams on the central goal of creating unique customer value. Doing so frees them from the contentious comparison mindset, gets them playing well together in the sandbox and concentrates everyone’s energies where they belong: winning with the customer.