Working Together:
Sales & Marketing as a Powerful Team
Lee Levitt
Managing Director
We hear it all
the time. Sales and marketing groups are each headed in different
directions. Marketing comes up with strategies and campaigns that
can’t be implemented by the sales organization. Sales people don’t
understand the products and won’t deliver the company message to
prospects.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Customers are asking about the bundled offer in
our latest advertisement. What bundled offer?
Why are we running breakfast seminars in
Chicago? We don’t have any sales people to follow up in Chicago! What
about Dallas…we’ve got loads of prospects in Dallas and a crack sales
team there!
These data sheets don’t make any sense to us.
Where’s the white paper the customers have been asking about?
Why don’t our sales people call on our existing
customers? We’re not generating any incremental business from our
existing customers!
My sales guys are spending a lot of time
creating marketing collateral that our customers can understand. What’s
marketing doing?
We send out hundreds of fulfillment kits each
month. Is anyone following up?
We had several hundred people visit our booth at
the trade show last month. Did we close any of them? Are we talking to
any of them? Do we even know who visited the booth?
If you’re a sales or marketing professional, you’ve
heard all this and more. In many, perhaps most companies, sales and
marketing organizations compete for resources and don’t work well
together.
In fact, at the recent ITSMA Marketing Services
conference held in Atlanta, aligning the efforts of sales and marketing
was listed as one of the five key marketing objectives.
It hasn’t always been this way…and it certainly
doesn’t have to be. In most early stage companies, sales and
marketing get along just fine…in fact as the company first gets started,
it’s the two people representing sales and marketing who make most of the
joint sales calls.
In early stage companies, this team works well
together as they have a single common goal – to land business. As the
company grows and the sales and marketing teams increase in size, this
goal becomes less of a driver. Instead, the organizations take on a life
of their own…looking to acquire resources, to gain additional employees,
to be recognized for the value they bring to the company without taking
blame for any of the customer failures.
Technology Companies Compound the Problem
In the technology market, we have a complicating
factor. Marketing tends to focus on the “speeds and feeds” of the product
or service, while sales people tend to sell on the basis of relationships
or discovering customer pain.
As a result, we see a critical lack of
alignment…engineering driven companies want to highlight product
features in marketing and sales activities, and many, if not most
marketing organizations tend to follow the lead of their competitors in
this.
While many sales people also focus on product
features rather than customer pain and customer benefits, we see an
interesting trend. Rookie sales people, unencumbered by the details of the
company’s offerings, focus on customer issues and do well. As they learn
more about their products, they get mired down in the details, and their
sales performance actually declines.
Great salespeople then replicate this “dummy
effect”…as they become more familiar with their products, they move back
to focusing on customer issues and use product or service details as
supporting material rather than as the main focus of their sales
activities.
Unfortunately most tech sales people never make it to
the "great phase," instead they remain stuck on pitching the features and
benefits of their products and services. The prospects are then left to
figure out the business value of these products and services on their own,
and when they don't, which is most of the time, no sale happens.
What’s a Savvy CEO to Do?
A savvy CEO can achieve an alignment of sales and
marketing organizations through the following:
- Give full accountability for both sales and
marketing to a single manager in the business, typically a senior VP
of sales and marketing. This person will straddle both sets of
activities, ensuring that the two organizations play well together.
- Instill a focus on the customer. As
companies lose their focus on solving customer problems, the various
groups within the company pay more attention to potentially divisive
internal issues. With a continued focus on the customer, from the top
down, and supported by customer advisory boards and cross-functional
teams, groups within the company will find reasons to work together to
solve customer problems…and to focus on the “right” new prospects.
- Maintain a focus on the bottom line and
enroll all the senior team in frequent goals-oriented discussions. We
were surprised to find that the weekly management team meeting at one
client focused on staff utilization and other operational issues. While
these topics are appropriate for a staff meeting, it certainly wasn’t
the best use of the time of the senior management.
- Use compensation to drive appropriate behavior.
Why not pay marketing people a bonus on sales increases…make
specific customer wins part of their MBOs. Similarly, pay sales people a
bonus on overall customer retention, or on the success of marketing
activities in which they play a part, such as conferences or tradeshows.
- Mix it up! If sales and marketing people
only see each other in the heat of battle, they aren’t likely to develop
relationships that go beyond the basic tasks of work. Throw a pizza
party on Friday for the sales and marketing teams…get them to mix
it up in a social setting.
The key here is to get the two groups thinking like
a single group. Get them working together toward a common goal and make
sure that they share a common vision.
The rest is easy.
. . .
Comments on this article appreciated
Article Copyright 2002,
The Acelera Group. All rights reserved.
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