Sales and Marketing: should we talk at, to
or with each other?
I keep hearing, we all keep hearing, “Marketing doesn’t give us enough good leads” and “Sales doesn’t follow up enough on the leads we give them.”
We all dissect and come up with 100 excuses as to why this occurs and we each complain to each other and to our bosses.
While not a new subject, it is still an issue today even with all the inbound and outbound marketing and sales tactics available to companies today. The choruses, as noted in a Pardot infographic, still exist: “Marketing keeps sending me leads that aren’t ready to buy.” “Sales… always prefer their own leads.”
Plus, there are other sources that try to work at suggesting clear differences between the two functions. Such as, “marketing” is a longer term brand building process and focuses on strategic intentions where “sales” is focused on the immediate challenges and developing relationships with customers and prospects. Maybe this is structured so that responsibilities, staffing, structure and measurements can be set up apart from each other. Yet, at the same time, other choruses sing the tune that marketing works when relationships are created with the buyer and that sales works when helping prospects and customers think about and solve issues that are long-term in nature.
Marketing and Sales Enablement: It does work.
Why are there a lot of discussions about this subject? Because when the two forces are working in sync more sales, more growth, more leads, more quotas nailed and more revenue is achieved. Easy to see stats can be found here.
So what’s to be done?
Two suggestions:
1. Review, Remind, Repetition
There are literally, or so it seems, an infinite number of suggestions centered on helping sales and marketing people find ways to work well together. Reminding, reiterating and reinforcing how it can work, does work and should work should be an on-going internal business strategy.
HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales platform, suggests regular meetings and communications, and coordination between content development and customer priorities among an array of other suggestions. And, to consistently do these activities.
Oracle, which provides cloud applications and platform services, suggests creating shared definitions (define who is a contact, what is a qualified lead and opportunity and what the sales stages are) and a shared set of metrics to define the sales/marketing pipeline. And, to consistently follow these definitions and metrics.
2. Talk
