Why Should Salespeople Work with Marketing, Anyway?

It may seem simplistic, but every company needs to think more about why and how marketing and sales should work together. Marketing is going to have to take the lead in this effort if it is to move beyond being seen as a support function. Marketers spend plenty of time creating compelling messages for customers, but they should take time to create a different campaign: one that conclusively demonstrates the value of marketing and sales collaboration.

There should be two versions of this campaign:

• Functional plan. The leaders of marketing should develop a list of ways that marketing can work with sales to sales’ benefit. And then run it by sales leaders to see what they would add or change. Then send the list to everyone in marketing and sales so they get a clear sense of why they should collaborate more. Just as FedEx employees all know that the work they do together is designed to get packages to customers the next day before 10:30 a.m., marketing and sales should develop a shared understanding of why and how they should work together. This plan should  be more specific than “making the sale.”
• Personal plan. Think about your own role. If you don’t have any direct interactions with salespeople, how could you work with them in a way that’s valuable to you and them?

Right now, it seems that the collaborative gap between sales and marketing is mostly papered over with technology. For example, the trend toward creating a closed-loop lead generation and nurturing process between marketing and sales is a positive step, but it seems like a bridge across the chasm rather than a true route to collaboration. Sales and marketing create a shared definition of a sales-ready lead, implement software to track leads from marketing to sales and back to marketing, and then go back to doing their respective jobs in isolation.

In typical functional fashion, sales and marketing have gravitated toward things that the other can’t or won’t do. To greatly oversimplify it, sales sells and marketing does that mysterious “creative” thing it does. Few salespeople or marketers feel qualified—or interested—in crossing over to the other side.

Find Shared Tasks
Many organizations we talk to are baffled about how to bridge the gap. They try to do it with golf games or off-site team-building exercises. That can help, but salespeople and marketers need more concrete reasons to work together.

It’s all about that basic mammalian instinct: empathy. It’s much easier to see the value of someone else’s work when you’ve tried to do the same thing yourself. You need to find tasks that both sales and marketing have a need for and interest in but that make sense to share.

Our research on Account-Based Marketing has revealed a few such tasks:

• Customer understanding. In B2B, both marketers and salespeople know the value of learning about customers’ business issues and needs. And both know how to gain that understanding. But it makes sense to collaborate. Salespeople are best equipped and most motivated to understand the “now” of the account: what has already been sold to customers and what they are most likely to buy next. Marketers can use those contacts to start building a larger context—the business issues that cross functional, corporate, and vertical boundaries. Marketing needs this information to create thought leadership and marketing materials designed to reach many different clients at once.
  Salespeople may have this kind of broader perspective, but more than likely they don’t have time to gather it. However, they know (or can be convinced) that having this deeper level of information will enable them to have more intelligent conversations with executives at prospect companies, spot additional opportunities to add value, and build more trusted relationships. Why? Because it is a deeper, more thorough version of what they already are doing to make the sale.
• Sharing what works. Salespeople love to get clear, simple tips on what’s working for others. Marketing can help. By doing research within multiple accounts, marketers gain invaluable perspective on broad customer trends and best practices for reaching customers. Marketing develops an institutional memory that can help salespeople create shortcuts by identifying what has worked in the past and what has not, what resources may be appropriate, and what company assets exist that can help.

What are the ways that you collaborate with salespeople? Please share your thoughts and experiences on my blog.

2 Responses to “Why Should Salespeople Work with Marketing, Anyway?”

1. Suzanne Lowe Says:
   May 23rd, 2009 at 9:18 AM

   Great points here, but the real “glue” for sales and marketing to work together must be management’s reconfiguration of the processes, skills and support for truly integrating marketing and sales. I call these the “Integration Imperatives.” Too often, we ask marketers and sellers to remake their own functions, and then we wonder why our firms still have so many silos.

2. Rinku Says:
   October 15th, 2009 at 1:51 AM

   I agree completely. It is greatly dependent on the management to develop systems, tools and processes which ensure greater integration / communication between the two functions.

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