When I first started out on my search for a daily crust, I worked through the entire gambit of sales and marketing jobs, from B2B, B2C, and direct telemarketing.
Tele-sales is often confused with telemarketing; the latter is when the caller is more engaged in spreading the company’s word or doing market research, whereas telesales has always been about closing a sale. I was often commission-based, which focuses you hard on that deal and that deal alone.
When doing sales, I would work my way through never-ending lists of names, with little understanding of what the word marketing meant. Had I done so, I might well have queried the quality of the leads I was given. My ignorance saved me from indulging in the proverbial inter-departmental blame game between sales and marketing, which has gone on since both were incepted.
Salespeople habitually blame marketing for both a lack of leads and their unqualified, low state.
Marketers say salespeople don’t bother to follow up on what they are given. Sales complain of the late arrival or poor quality of sales support materials and packs. Marketers will say that salespeople’s only job is to close a sale, and half of them can’t do that properly. Salespeople believe marketers play around on social media all day.
I garnered a small understanding of some of marketing’s job when I started making and selling sandwiches around offices. It was a fairly novel concept back then. Face to face, it was easy to talk to the customers, learn their favourites, and adapt the menu accordingly to suit demand. I became a one-man band sales and marketing team.
But I still thought in sales terms of individual customers, whereas marketers think of the customers in terms of market segments for which they design brilliant strategies that salespeople will subsequently ignore, claiming marketing has no concept of the real world and real customers.
With both feet planted firmly in the sales camp, it is not that surprising that when scaling up businesses later, I tended to focus on my sales department. Running micro-businesses had made me automatically focus on providing what solved customers’ needs and problems.
Only during the scaling up did I expand to having both sales and marketing teams. Even then, I recruited with my sales hat firmly on, aiming only to get an extra support team for sales that would also do our social media. It is at this stage of growth, marketing should be coming into its own, and you benefit from equal strength in sales and marketing.
This conception of marketing as a support system rather than a key driver often comes from the business owner. Marketers are allowed to provide sales materials for activations, visuals, and support emails. They are not seen as part of the function of moving already warm leads further down the pipeline or improving customer retention.
Part of me felt that good marketers should have an impact on sales and therefore should be rewarded, but the salesperson in me still felt that real rewards lay with those who closed deals. Marketing is often excluded from the financial rewards of sales, which in itself puts the two on different footing. It also means salespeople tend to have no interest in anything that does not immediately impact on the revenue stream.
Sales and Marketing – how to join them
Smarketing, a process of integrating sales and marketing, was first aired in a report by the Aberdeen group back in 2010. They found that when this is done successfully, revenue grows up to 20%. We also know that a lack of cohesion not only affects revenue but also the morale of the entire company.
Various things can contribute to a better integration of sales and marketing. Time spent by members of each department within the other is a good place to start.
Using a CRM system with a strong marketing function that the marketers have to use on a daily basis helps demystify the extensive terminology both areas use. In addition, marketers will be at home extracting data from a joint system and therefore take on board feedback from current customers, which could have otherwise been perceived as sales criticism.
Putting a system of joint financial rewards will always result in greater levels of co-operation, though personally I believe that the natural sales psyche will always flourish best with an additional closing reward. Equally, if rewards are at least partly based on profitability, not only is it good for the overall bottom line, but it also encourages sales to understand marketing’s pricing constraints.
All this can be done, but you will always be left with two groups of very different personality types who will, by their very natures, tend to rub each other up the wrong way. As a leader, the best you can hope for is to encourage mutual respect that ends in them working cohesively to create customer value and getting customer results.
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