How Marketing and Sales can work together?

I attended the recent Tech Marketing and Sales Think Tank roundtable discussion organized by ITAC ( Information Technology Association of Canada) and SMA.

The topic was “Sales vs. Marketing: closing the great divide”. One of the most often asked questions to me is how marketing and sales can work together. I heard a great analogy during the discussion - “farmer’s field”. “Marketing plants the seed, and cares for the plants while they are growing. Sales conducts the harvest.  Sales must save some of the harvest to generate seeds for the next crop. Without Marketing, Sales cannot harvest.  Without Sales, Marketing cannot plant.”

Marketing and Sales are different because Marketing, in most cases is one to many, whereas sales are normally one to one. However, with the new technology and changing customer behaviour, Marketing’s role has evolved. Today, marketing not only needs to continue to utilize one to many approach for brand awareness and thought leadership as corporate marketing, but also has to take responsibility for generating leads, so-called field marketing. At the field level, human to human marketing has become a trend for 2015 and beyond. In the Human Era, a business will thrive by individualizing an audience and building authentic connections.

But how can marketing provide individualized content and meaningful intelligence and at the same time enable sales? This comes with sales and marketing cooperation. Unfortunately, in the real business world, the co-operation is very challenging. Sales focus on closing deals and work diligently to meet their sales target. Marketing, on the other hand, has segmented into different functional groups such as corporate communication, digital and event marketing, each has different goals and KPIs. Both organizations have high expectations of the other, but very limited time and patience to understand the other party, let alone affect co-operation.

Marketing considers sales as the go-to resource for customers. Marketing wants to collect information such as customer buying behaviour at the different stages of the buyer’s journey and decision-making criteria as much as possible to direct marketing strategies through sales co-operation. But often times, the response rate is low as Sales is very protective of their customer base, worrying that marketing may take away some of their control over sales. Sales is also demanding that Marketing provide as much competitive information and industry intelligence to better equip them.

Here are some tips to improve Marketing and Sales cooperative strategies that work:

• Constant communications to close the misconception and build mutual understanding.
• Involve both Marketing and Sales in the planning and budgeting processes and find out common goals.
• Redefine sales compensation plans to encourage Sales to provide customer insights and maintain a good relationship with existing customer base.
• Include Marketing in the sales pipeline and build compensation/bonus plans accordingly.