Managing the Dynamic Between Sales and Marketing

In his keynote session, Senior Vice President of Marketing at SSI Schaefer, Enrico Gazzano, explains what developments he’s seen in both the sales and marketing sectors.??

Post pandemic, ‘the first thing to change was the customer journey’, especially in terms of B2B investment businesses, he says. Gazzano goes on to explain that this development is particularly prevalent where new customers are concerned. ‘The rules of engagement are totally flipped on their head’.??

He demonstrates the bottom lines of how we can reinvent the customer journey, as well as how we can we reach out and engage customers online.?Naturally, coming to these conclusions took a lot of experimentation analysis - namely through digital trade fairs, seminars, webinars etc. but although these methods appeared to be effective at the beginning of the pandemic, in time, the market became saturated, and interest sadly dropped off.??

As a result, sales and marketing departments have been increasingly forced to collaborate and depend on each other’s skillsets, to reach their goals as the pandemic progressed.?Customer knowledge, digital insight and engagement all became key themes throughout both departments and wholly relevant to the achievements they each wanted to reach. ‘Post-Corona has been a very dynamic time’, shares Gazzano. ‘Marketing and sales have entered a very happy marriage’.?

For Enrico, the biggest lesson learnt from Covid, is how resilient the industry is. ‘Take switching to online for example. The Ecommerce boom naturally drove interest from Ecommerce solution providers to meet businesses’ needs quicker.?SSI Schaefer, as a material handling company is the backbone of this - so without this, our survival would not have been possible. Handling single orders instead of pallets has been the biggest game changer for us’.???

Hypergrowth in Covid-19?

Despite the hype around companies that managed to grow exponentially during Covid, it must be acknowledged that there are many dangers and risks, where hypergrowth is concerned.???

Gazzano shares a pertinent quote from F1 driver Mario Andretti: ‘If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough’. ‘I have seen companies die from hypergrowth’, he explains.???

‘The balance between sales, marketing and operations is the most important thing in terms of survival during these exciting times of expansion’.?These three departments must all be holding the reigns equally; they must be walking alongside one another.?There must be total synchronicity, not just between sales and marketing, but with operations as the bottleneck, also.?

In Enrico Gazzano’s experience, together with international co-operation, this is the only way a company can experience, enjoy, and thrive through hypergrowth. Otherwise history dictates that corporate suffocation is somewhat imminent.??

For more fascinating insights on the ever-evolving relationship between sales and marketing, register?for Quartz Networks’ Spring 2022 CONNECT CMO Leadership Summit: https://quartz.news/ueisV