Marketing and Sales Need to Share a Leader

It’s time to bring sales and marketing together.

By that, we don’t mean integrating the two functions. Rather, it’s time to bring them together under one leader. In ITSMA’s recent survey, Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact, we found that in 17% of the 31 companies we surveyed, marketing and sales report to a shared leader that is a rung below the CEO—such as a vice president of sales and marketing.

Now that’s not exactly an overwhelming number. These companies are far outnumbered by the 66% in which sales and marketing report separately to the company or division CEO/president/GM. But we think that in this case, the minority should rule.

Why? For the past two years, marketers have told us that sales enablement is a top priority. We think that sales enablement is more than brochures, data sheets, and tools. It should extend to shared goals and metrics between marketing and sales. The only way to know whether marketing is improving salespeople’s effectiveness is by having them share accountability for revenue and sales quota goals.

Shared leadership is the way to start. It helps assure that the burden to improve performance will be shared fairly between marketing and sales. It also creates a single point of authority and accountability for improving the processes that marketing and sales share. Here are six reasons that marketing and sales need shared leadership now:

1. Integrate a split buying process. Many companies still treat the buying process as having two separate and distinct pieces, with marketing generating leads and then handing leads off to sales. But marketing and sales should collaborate to move the customer/prospect through the entire customer buying process, not just hand off leads.
2. Create a single system for tracking leads. One of the best ways to encourage collaboration between marketing and sales is to integrate a marketing automation system with sales’ CRM system to track lead generation and nurturing. But that kind of integration requires leadership.
3. Reduce indirect selling activities. Shared leadership would also help eliminate the inefficiency that’s occurring right now in the sales process. Salespeople spend 23% of their time on indirect selling activities (lead generation and tracking, planning, account management, creating presentations, customer research, after-sales service, etc.). This is time that could be better spent in front of customers.
4. Make marketing accountable for that reduction. If sales enablement is all about reducing the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, marketers need to be taking steps to reduce the time that salespeople spend on activities that marketers could be doing more efficiently. But until more marketing organizations become accountable for reducing the time sales spends in indirect selling activities, improvements are less likely. We found that just 11% of marketing organizations are held accountable for doing this now, whereas 37% are in the planning stages. A strong, shared marketing and sales leader could convince the other 51% to get started soon.
5. Help marketing improve its most effective programs. In our survey, marketers told us that the three most effective sales enablement activities are reference programs, ROI/price justification tools, and client briefing centers. To be effective, all these programs require close collaboration between sales and marketing.
6. Know what the other hand is doing. We found that companies that are succeeding at sales enablement use quantitative metrics to gauge the impact of sales enablement activities, such as:
   • Number of closed deals influenced by marketing
   • Number of opportunities in the pipeline
   • Number of sales-ready leads generated

But of the companies we surveyed, just 16% have shared metrics between sales and marketing. Worse, only 25% of companies said that their marketing and sales groups even have an understanding of each other’s goals and metrics. That’s downright shocking.

If we are going to close the gap between marketing and sales and truly reduce the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, it’s time for marketing and sales to get together.

Participating companies in our survey, Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact, can download a free copy of the results here.

One Response to “Marketing and Sales Need to Share a Leader”

1. Suzanne Lowe Says:
   December 10th, 2009 at 5:26 PM

   Thank you ITSMA, for adding volume to the points I’ve made in my book, The Integration Imperative!

Your comments

ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. We work with the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA annual program clients include business leaders such as Avaya, BT, Cisco, Deloitte, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Tata Consultancy Services, among others. Our comprehensive research, consulting, and training on topics including ITSMA Account-Based Marketing℠, Brand Positioning, and Solutions Development provide the insight and experience companies need to improve business results. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.