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I’m presenting a workshop this week titled - How to get sales and marketing on the same page.
The point of the discussion is to help the audience, made up of marketers and the sales people for those marketers, understand that while they may indeed perform unique and necessary functions, they have shared objectives.
So, while, as the title of this post suggests, the gap between what sales does and what marketing does in support may seem vast (and perhaps even at odds) there is an absolute need to strike a balance between their independent and interdependent selves.
What you are reading is one part of a two part post - the other, by the way, is titled - Those idiots in sales just don’t get it. In case you want in on the joke, the body of both posts is the same, only the names have been changed to expose the guilty. So, that’s the real point - to be more effective sales teams should learn how to be more about ideas and relevant conversations (more like marketing), to be more effective marketing should learn how to build better relationships (more like sales).
To further illustrate my point I’d like to offer my definition of marketing: marketing is - getting someone who has a need to know, like and trust you. Now let’s blend in my definition of sales: sales is - taking know, like and trust and converting it to try, buy, repeat and refer.
See, for now marketing owns the conversation, the idea, and sales owns the relationship. Wouldn’t sales and marketing life be grand if organizations learned how to use relevant conversations to build better customer relationships instead of metrics and quotas destined to keep their teams off the same page.
Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at Mar 25, 08 | 2:13 pm and is filed under Lead Conversion, Lead Generation, Marketing Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
John:
I used to teach preso skills to mixed sales and marketing teams all across the country and it was AMAZING how frequently they hated each other. There was not harmony between their functions, nor did they appear to serve the same customer.
I don’t know why it is so hard for organizations to get alignment between the groups, but boy is it necessary.
And I may piss off my marketing buddies, but I have to say that the salespeople usually had the scoop on what the customers *really* wanted to talk about, while marketing created gigantic PPT decks of death. Huge generalization, not always the fault of the functions, but it happened too often not to note.
If you can help get these groups aligned, the world will be a better place.
So, where’s the workshop? Online?
Sorry Todd, It’s a private gig for a software customer of mine.
Sales and marketing need to tell the same story, and it should be the truth!
Marketing & advertising often tells a story that sales people have to make excuses for and defend.
And everyone else has the impossible task of making the promises made by Sales come true. It’s a vicious cycle. I haven’t been in an organization yet where everyone didn’t hate Sales - they are notorious (especially in IT) for promising the impossible on an even more impossible deadline. Ultimately creating angry, disillusioned customers.
We talk in Marketing about communicating with our audience - what about our internal audiences? When Marketing and Sales (and yes, IT Production) don’t talk, the customer loses.
[...] — you have to check it out to see what I mean) last week that began with the entry, “Those idiots in marketing just don’t get it.” In it, Jantsch provides his personal definitions of marketing and of sales. He writes, [...]
[...] a post by John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing and the Duct Tape Marketing blog titled, “Those idiots in marketing just don’t get it.” In it, Jantsch provides his personal definitions of marketing and of sales. He writes, [...]
Great post. Its management that need to take the lead and create a common synergy so that both sales and marketing are pulling in the same direction. Unfortunately bad communication and lack of trust often contribute to the sales department devaluing the marketing function and visa versa.