Marketing vs Sales: The Salesman
[Part 2 of the Marketing vs Sales Series -this post is graciously guest written by Dave Cooke aka "The Sales Cooke" see more of his writing on sales at http://www.salescooke.com]
The challenge between sales and marketing is that they don’t communicate. Sales resents marketing because they are theoretical, internally based strategists. Marketing resents the sales teams because they are the non-conformist cowboys who get all the credit and do nothing the way they are expected to. It is the rubber-meets-the-sky-team (marketing) vs. the rubber-meets-the-road (sales) team. How could they not like each other?
The reality is that these two groups do not get along because organizations have not realized that collective and effective growth requires a collaborative, interactive, and strategically joined-at-the-hip partnership between these teams. The most effective customer feedback can be obtained directly from the market by sales. The most disciplined sense of strategy and organization comes from the marketing mind. Instead of having marketing develop a campaign in their functional silo, the marketing team could be working with the sales team to help bring their creative ideas come to life in collaboration with the sales team.
Until businesses realize that there are collective strengths associated with collaboration between the two groups, there will be a schism between the two groups. They both have their functional value. However, that value is exponentially enhanced if the two would actually work together, not apart. Yes, sales ultimately receives the high praise for their success. It is because their efforts can be easily measured in tangible, real terms – closed deals and sales related revenues. If the marketing guys want that type of credit, they will have to hit the street and close some deals. Ofcourse, we know that won’t happen. If they could actually sell, that is what they would be doing. Instead they will continue to hide in their offices working on charts and graphs and promotional campaigns and complaining about those sales cowboys.
I was just discussing this topic with someone on Twitter. Part of the problem is caused because they often have two seperate agendas and both sales AND marketing don’t understand each other’s challenges, goals and objectives. If a company took a risk and successfully integrated these two departments, I suspect that the results could be staggering.
Cheers!
Kelley
http://www.FearlessSellingBlog.com
So then my question is what do you do to get sales and marketing working together? I envision a perfect feedback loop, where the sales folks sell on the message and the marketing peeps tailor the message to information they get from the sales, but what are the barriers to this kind of integration? Besides the simplistic desire for praise, of course.
I am on the technical side of sales for a semiconductor company, and a few years ago my boss moved from sales to product planning, which was under marketing. At the next sales conference he said the following:
“As most of you know, I recently moved from the sales organization to marketing. After being here for a while and thinking about it, I think I have figured out the difference between sales and marketing.
In marketing, you KNOW when you’re lying.”
It took us all a second to figure it out, but then uproarious laughter ensued.