What is your go-to-market strategy? This is also known as your marketing strategy. If your company has no go-to-market strategy, anything your salespeople do to generate sales is okay and this includes cutting the price. I can't believe I said that! For those of you who have read this column before you know my position on cutting prices.

Sales is the tactical arm of marketing. It exists to execute a company's marketing strategy at the field level. That's it. That's all. If marketing flies at 10,000 feet, sales moves at ground level. From its vantage point, marketing sets its sights on the market, scans the competitive landscape and directs the sales efforts. Sales and marketing are not just integrated, they are symbiotic.

So if your company lacks a marketing strategy—an integrated and coherent plan to engage your market—it is not a sales problem and you won't fix it with a sales solution. It is a marketing failure. It's a home-office problem. It's a management oversight.

This plan is a dynamic strategy for satisfying the needs of the market and achieving the profit motive for your company. Because it is strategic, it adds discipline to your company's sales efforts. It answers questions such as:

• What are the different customer segments we serve?
• What are their common needs?
• How do we bring value to each individual segment?
• What image (reputation) do we want to project in our market?
• What is our unique selling proposition?
• How will we communicate this value to these customer segments?

Armed with information about the market, competition, customers and products, salespeople spread the good news about their solution. They tell their story to as many people as will listen. They gather input from their customers, make observations about the competition, collect data and share that information with marketing and the cycle goes on—dynamic, integrated, strategic and tactical.

In small companies, resources are limited and there may not be a marketing team. The manager or owner must then pick up the slack. A lack of marketing discipline is as bad as not having a purchasing discipline. This marketing discipline answers many sales questions before they are ever asked. Simple questions such as: Can I discount? How much? Where? And for whom?

I've met clients who wanted to be “everything to everyone” and ended up being nothing special to anybody. Their lack of strategy spilled over into the field and confused salespeople as well as customers. You can't blame salespeople for a lack of strategic selling when there's no strategy to begin with.

And you can't make up for a lack of strategy with strong tactics. It's like sending multiple military units into the field and saying, “We must take that objective. Now go out there and do it.” Imagine the chaos that would result from that. Artillery would rain on friendly forces, air strikes would be random and ground assault would overlap, perhaps confusing friend for foe. Dramatic, yes. But that's the point. No strategy means no coherence.