Sales and Marketing: If You Only Understood Me, We Could Get Along!

The chasm between marketing and sales organizations has existed for years and continues to be a challenge. Now more than ever, with the speed and complexity of today's marketplace, bridging the gap is crucial to enabling growth. In this excerpt from Frost & Sullivan's Executive MindXchange Chronicles, a panel of marketing and sales executives discuss the big issues: Why aren't we better aligned? What makes a good lead? What metrics make sense? And, the age-old question: How can sales better understand—and capitalize on—the value marketing brings to the table?



SESSION
SALES & MARKETING CROSSFIRE - If You Only Understood Me, We Could Get Along!

MODERATOR
Stephen Liguori, Former Executive Director, Global Innovation & New Models, GE

PANELISTS

Cheryl Bascomb, Director of Marketing & Business Development, BerryDunn
Christine Feuell, Vice President, Global Marketing & Strategy, Johnson Controls
George Stenitzer, Former Vice President, Communications, Tellabs
Andrew Cook, Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Relations & Marketing Officer, Areva

TAKE-AWAY

It’s not just about sales and marketing; instead, marketing should be integrated across the whole organization, with involvement from all departments, including sales, tech, legal, and finance. The company’s mission must be driven throughout and across the entire organization to create a common culture and understanding of goals.

BEST PRACTICES

Liguori asked the panel: How can sales, marketing—and also technology, finances, and IT—become more integrated?

According to Andrew Cook of Areva, Inc., organizations need to ask: Is the company, from a sales and marketing perspective, living the soul of its mission? Your values and mission must be driven throughout the whole organization, and sales and marketing must be aligned with the product. If you end up with a marketing or brand management strategy, and then your product goes in another direction, you will have a mess.

The right answers depend largely on the culture of the organization, said Christine Feuell of Johnson Control. When she was at Ford, she said, the culture created attention in a way that was almost combative, which was unintentional. Sales was given priority, and marketing saw sales targets, whereas marketing metrics were longer term and less immediate. To fix the culture and increase alignment, marketing needs to get creative in how they demonstrate value and give sales reps valuable tools. The challenge is that marketing tends to operate a bit longer term and is more strategic, while sales is more tactical and day to day.

According George Stenitzer, former VP of Communications with Tellabs, his company had a situation in which sales was fighting with everybody else. Salespeople often had complaints like, “This customer needs this feature, and if you don’t give it to me I can’t sell it.” There was also an issue of who would get credit for revenue: sales or marketing? Tellabs attacked that by keeping the focus for each team on the customer.

Historically, strategic and business goals have come from the C-suite down a linear pipe, said BerryDunn’s Cheryl Bascomb. Products were handed to the sales force to sell. Now it’s more iterative, with more of a cycle in which sales can get feedback from marketing. Also, sales has a greater connection to the client and therefore can share feedback with marketing. The key is to balance the micro view of sales and marketing’s macro view to limit the tension.

TAKE-AWAY

Collaboration is crucial to the success of both sales and marketing. Liguori asked the panelists for some examples of how they’ve increased collaboration.

BEST PRACTICES

Feuell’s team had a situation in which marketing channels weren’t reaching their intended audience so the fundamental metrics goals weren’t being reached. The biggest problem was that marketing wasn’t getting any input from the rest of the organization about what was needed. So the team started over and got the necessary input. One key part of the collaboration was a training session in which sales reps were asked: How would you explain this product to your customer if you were just walking down the street? That gave marketing valuable insight and made sales know they were part of the solution.

When Feuell first arrived at Johnson Controls, the first thing she did was present to leadership what marketing was, to define the role and responsibility of the marketing team within the company. This type of transparency allows leadership teams to align efforts for a more cohesive strategy and more results-driven outcomes.

As a CPA firm, BerryDunn relies on consultative sales, Bascomb said. The company’s business developers are the sales team. Marketing needs to provide them with the sales tools they need. They think first of service, so from a marketing standpoint you have to help them think about the customer at the center of the wheel. That can be a challenge to help sales move forward, but data about what customers think of the brand can help.

TAKE-AWAY

In addition to information, marketing can also provide help with technology to sales.

Feuell said her company recently started using Salesforce. That helped because sales could see visually how they were progressing within the pipeline process, and as they converted leads and were putting them into the pipeline, marketing was able to show them true data and evidence.

According to Bascomb, BerryDunn’s salespeople could use technology comfortably, but they were less comfortable with social media. They came to marketing and asked for help meeting their goals. When the sales team became more comfortable with social media, they were able to help provide content for those platforms.

Stenitzer recommend looking for ways to help sales get their work done quicker and better. At Tellabs, a survey found that salespeople weren’t getting paid their full commissions, so staff members were spending as much as a day per week calculating their commissions on their own. That’s one area where better technology can help make the job easier.

FINAL THOUGHT

The key to success and integration is to start with the customer, Cook said. All parts of the organization should be aligned around a focus on the customer. You may have a great product and a great marketing campaign, but typically most employees don’t experience the customer, and that’s not good.

For marketing, campaigns shouldn’t just push the product, but present the company and its offerings in a customer-centric way. Marketers can also help the sales team think in the same way.

According to Feuell, marketers must learn how to represent the voice of the customer as best as they can and integrate that into their marketing materials. Focus on how you help grow customers and how you cross-sell more to those customers, Stenitzer said.

It all begins with a sale, Cook said, and sales always begin with a customer. Marketing’s job is to bring customers and sales together.

For more valuable insight from the 15th Anniversary MARKETING WORLD 2014: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, be sure download a copy of Frost & Sullivan’s Executive MindXchange Chronicles, a collection of the key take-aways and best practices from all of the event’s presentations and interactive sessions.