Sales and Marketing: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

In practice, most sales and marketing departments don't collaborate - and sometimes they even compete. Although they are both responsible for generating revenues, sales and marketing have different roles, which often lead them to butt heads.

The problem is especially pronounced in companies where the leaders' backgrounds are in technology or science. Focused on product development, or the next breakthrough, they tend to lose sight of the customer. Further, they frequently lack experience or education in marketing and sales. The result: costly mistakes and wasted money. Here's what usually happens:

• Roles and expectations for sales and marketing are unclear.
• Salespeople don't embrace marketing programs, considering them "fluff."
• Sales and marketing messages are inconsistent, and prospects are confused.
• Lead generation and sales follow-up activities are not coordinated.
• Money is wasted on ineffective marketing programs that neglect to focus on prime prospects and their needs.
• Sales and marketing departments blame each other for poor revenues and profits.

Besides the cold costs of lost opportunities, the situation creates the risk of strained internal relationships and poor morale. Can this marriage be saved?

Sales and Marketing - Worlds Apart
First, corporate leaders need to recognize that sales and marketing people really do come from different planets. Personalities are dissimilar. They each have their own lingo, and they're often motivated by different drivers. The marketing people on Venus - especially those with marketing communications backgrounds - enjoy the creative part of the business. They're turned on by a slick new logo design, a killer ad headline, a photo shoot in L.A. The salespeople over on Mars, on the other hand, get more jazzed by a hot lead, a big bonus, and sales materials that actually help them to sell. Marketing and salespeople may understand conceptually that their jobs both involve getting customers to buy, but they don't think alike on a day-to-day level.

Add to this mix the fact that most companies have their own definitions of sales and marketing. This makes for grand confusion about roles and responsibilities when people move from one firm to another. For example, some salespeople expect to have input into the marketing plan; others don't want their time wasted when they could be on the road … selling.

An Illustration
A software company has begun to stagnate in sales to their prime market. Executive management recognizes that the market is saturated, and until new products under R&D are market-ready, sales growth will rely primarily on doing more business with existing customers. The new sales VP is convinced that the sales team could do a better job of selling to other potential buyers and departments in existing accounts. When the sales and marketing VPs get together, they discover that:

• Promotional programs and materials focus on individual products rather than solutions.
• Salespeople don't bother trying to penetrate other departments within their customer companies; they don't know how to sell overall business solutions. because they haven't learned the buying motivations of untapped prospects.
• Sales incentives and commission schedules are not designed to encourage the sales team to reach those unexplored prospects.
• Salespeople are not well-trained to articulate the value of their company's full range of products and services.
• There is no process by which the marketing team gets feedback from the sales - yet the sales team can't understand why marketing seems clueless about the needs of potential customers with different buying motivations.

Bringing Sales and Marketing Together with a Collaborative Plan
Executive management needs to find ways to inspire sales and marketing leadership to establish, and agree upon, clear and realistic sales objectives. Marketing and sales management should then work together to map out a seamless marketing and sales program tied directly to those objectives. During that process, sales management should walk through the entire sales cycle with marketing, and agree upon ways in which marketing can support sales through every step of that process.

A concrete marketing and sales plan for the above situation might be:

• New marketing materials with messages emphasizing complete solution selling, and geared to the hot buttons of those buyers and influencers in unexplored departments.
• Redesigned Web site consistent with the marketing literature.
• Quarterly newsletter including success stories from customers that have migrated to, and benefited from, complete solutions.
• Recommendation to executive leadership that the sales incentive program be revamped to encourage the sales team to penetrate accounts more deeply.
• Joint training or brainstorming programs to ensure that sales and marketing teams understand various business issues of potential buyers, and how to position the value solutions of their offerings.
• Joint presentation by sales and marketing VPs to gain buy-in from senior management regarding new sales and marketing strategies.
• Monthly social gatherings of sales and marketing teams, and a formalized program of information-sharing focused on feedback from the field.

Creating this collaborative approach ideally begins at the executive level. But sales and marketing managers can take the lead themselves, and demonstrate the results of their cooperation to the executive team to gain support and adequate funding for their programs. Then all levels of management should work to foster a culture of cooperation and teamwork that focuses ultimately on the customer.