It’s a vexing question, but one that every company needs to answer. When Sales goes east and Marketing goes west, results go south.
Of all the ways to align sales and marketing I’ve seen or tried, this seems to work best.
Sales. To think more like a marketer, sales people should talk to buyers outside their comfort zone. That’s how you broaden your perspective. When I was selling for an industrial distributor, our tendency was to gravitate to purchasing agents. We should have been calling on operations, marketing and sales directors. We would have discovered more benefits to our own offering by coming to understand their needs. We could have solved their problems – if we had known they existed.
Marketing. Data and theory alone do not produce effective strategy or programs. Marketers need to get in the field and talk to customers, and make those customer calls with the sales person. Marketers need to understand what sales people go through day to day servicing accounts. Those daily details are the germs of winning marketing ideas.
What other ways can sales and marketing get on the same page? (And by the way, if you are a one-person show, you still might find this to be a problem! More about that in future posts … )
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Here’s the challenge, as Peter Drucker once wrote: “Indeed, selling and marketing are antithetical rather than synonymous or even complimentary.”
The only real way for them to be on the same page is if there is only one page. A misalignment of sales and marketing is a leadership and (I believe) a branding problem. If the leadership of the company has not identified a brand promise, it’s likely the two camps will use separate scripts.
Jay, I agree it all starts with leadership. Yet even with a clearly defined and unified strategy, sales and marketing can work at cross purposes, each department doing things that don’t quite make sense to the other. What I was trying to get at here is that sales and marketing have difficulty seeing things from the other point of view, which makes it hard to deal with, let alone get past, day to day friction.
Brad, I was a sales manager who then became a Regional Marketing Manager so understand all too well the the struggle to align these two disciplines. As a sales manager I had only covered one state, as a marketer, I had to cover 7, each requiring different strategies but with an eye on how those would roll up into our corporate objectives. I found that as a marketer talking to customers and traveling with reps was invaluable. It is easy as a marketer to rely on theory and data, talking to customers helps you stay firmly connected to those you want to reach. My second secret weapon was communication. I engaged sales managers and reps in market planning meetings. Allowing them to see and participate in the strategy stage kept us on the same page and easily collaborating to meet goals.
Karen, good point about communication (it’s no longer a secret!). That should have been on my list as well. When I was a sales manager I was way more motivated when I felt like I was part of the process.
This reminds me a lot about a session we had as part of our eMarketing Special Interest Group- aligning Marketing and IT. And it all comes down to communication and understanding. Communicate so you can try to understand one anothers’ point of views and expertise. I think this relates well to the sales vs. marketing conflict, as well.