Sales is the life blood of any business – without customers, members, supporters, patrons and the like, organisations cannot exist. Sales & Marketing’s sole focus is to attract and retain viable customers for their organisation. Even though Sales & Marketing share a common and noble purpose, we often find they are working at odds with each other taking sibling rivalry to a whole new level.
Yet life would be wonderful if sales and marketing teams could get along and work together. Unhappily the relationship is often fraught with conflict, turf wars and jealousy. However, it is possible and indeed necessary now, to create a cross-functional partnership that is effective and co-operative and creates meaningful value i.e. revenue, brand equity, loyalty, good will, profit, genuine corporate citizenship, etc., for all parties.
Let’s look at some of the ways we can build viable bridges and partnerships between sales and marketing:
Learn together
Sales and marketing departments are always expected to work together and collaborate yet they are treated as two separate functions. By bringing them together and educating / training them in the same things -i.e. sales processes, sales strategy, marketing concepts and strategies-, giving them a common language and ensuring each area understands the mechanics, goals and objectives they want to achieve we can begin to find common ground, a shared vocabulary and shared goals. People from both areas benefit from learning new skills and acquiring new knowledge and exploring new applications which in turn facilitates communication as well as aligning thinking, values and shared purpose.
find the common ground
Commit to a Common Understanding and Common Ground
Marketing deal with groups and sales deal with individuals. If sales and marketing work as two separate entities with different vocabularies, different goals and different projects, there’s always going to be natural barriers. Instead involve marketing in developing sales account plans and sales creating marketing plans. While this won’t fix everything it becomes an important influence in the process of creating an effective marketing and sales partnership.
Share Gain & Pain
Therefore one of the best ways for marketing to understand what it is like in the field is to allow them to experience it. When marketing people get in front of customers and experience the challenges and opportunitiessales peopleface everyday they have a better understanding of how the business needs to connect and interact with its client base and market place on real terms. As a result marketing teams are able to create more effective, real, marketing programs.
audit closed loop by sales and marketing
Create a Marketing-Sales Supply Chain
Get sales and marketing to create a map of the marketing and sales process, from marketing profiling a market segment through to sales closing deals and service feedback loop.
Close the Loop
Make sure there is a feedback process from sales to marketing. We cannot tell you how many times we hear how sales didn’t know this or that or marketing would have done something different if sales had only kept them informed. The best organisations are those that use sales as a resource to determine what is working and what isn’t. Sales should be encouraged to provide comprehensive, constructive feedback so that marketing can make adjustments for the future.
Here are some more related articles you might be interested in:
Why selling is now a team sport
From mass marketing to markets of one
Move over mass marketing here comes sales strategy
Leadership, sales and a clear message
Who is your brochure written for?
Remember everybody lives by selling something.
Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au
Perhaps one of the things that is missed by marketing managers is the correct identification of recalcitrance by a sales person to share their contacts. It is usually put down to jealousy, but may actually be obsolescence fears or a far greater fear that the marketing manager will bombard the client with the dreaded “EDM”. To date, these EDM or Email Direct messages have been the bane of my existence – sending them to my clients without my prior knowledge has resulted in embarrassing moments where I have not known about the current promotion before the client has.
The best way to deliver these marketing messages is via the salesperson. Two fundamental things come from this:
1. The salesperson knows about the event / promotion / vendor information
2. The salesperson can ensure that the message reaches the target audience.
Not every marketing campaign is right for every client. There will be some who never, ever read these emails – many have created specific rules to deal with these forms of email. Others can see the benefit for these messages and wait to see the next one.
The thing is, when I am designing a sales strategy, I more often than not design the marketing strategy at the same time. This ensures that I know what is going on and can influence the target clients, making sure that the exercise is not a waste of mine or the marketing manager’s time.