Why is achieving sales & marketing alignment so hard?

I love everything about selling (having been a VP of Sales for many years) so when I became a full time VP of Marketing, aligning the two teams to help improve lead generation just made sense to me. In addition, we bought a marketing automation system and this technology gave me a concrete way to involve sales and to help improve key aspects of their pospecting and sales cycles. I think it has been my experience and understanding of sales that helped me knit all this together. This does not seem to be the norm and this is the crux of the problem for the mis-alignment between sales and marketing.

I was talking to a Marketing Director recently and we were doing a Life of a Lead process flow - a key process to map for implementing marketing automation - and I was stunned to find out they knew next to nothing about sales or the sales process in their company. This is analogous to not knowing the profile of your target audience. How do you message them? How do you interact with them? What kind of high value offers do you make?

Whether you have sales in your background or not, the lesson learned is to get to know sales and your company's sales process and remember that the sales team is your ultimate customer. You produce Marketing Qualified Leads and they consume them. Once you have this sales savviness as a foundation, take a look at this post from Steve Woods of Eloqua which presents some great ideas for how to better align sales and marketing beginning with the impact you can help them make on revenue.

What has worked for you?