Marketing is from Mars, Sales is from Venus – aligning for the BIG WIN!

All cross-working relationships are essential but sales & marketing collaboration is something that any leader should invest time in, with drama expected. This alignment results in the bottom line and if leaders can align it optimally then you strike gold. But leaders shouldn’t shun sales or marketing when they speak their own language, it might come across as ball-passing or throwing each other under the bus but it’s actually not. Any CEO needs to understand the lingo a bit deeper and have a sense of where these teams come from: Mars or Venus.

Marketers from Mars

Marketers take their brand bible very very seriously. The brand is everything. Most of the time, every KPI revolves around the brand: brand awareness, engagement, reach, mentions etc. The sense of achievement for marketers is often derived from customer experience and they would do anything and everything to improve the customer experience: be it fighting with the product team or hustling with the finance team or wrestling with the leadership team.

Marketers might not read business news but they will follow influencers and be updated about google algorithms, trending content to all cool things under the sun.

Sales at Venus

On the other hand, sales people can be called less complex, definitely the news-reading type. It is important for sales to read business news and stay updated because they meet prospects and need “to do the small talk”. Problem solvers by nature they always tend to pitch the solution to a problem that the customer has. Achieving goals is extremely important to Sales, as their livelihood depends on closures.

Sales play it safe, for them they don’t want to say the wrong thing to a prospect whereas marketers tend to experiment more. Even the dress sense between sales and marketing is different, while sales go for a more crisp and safe attire, marketers tend to experiment with trends more often.

Often, anyone would call marketing to be in a land of their own and often it might be true.

How do we find the classic fit for optimal results? The gap will always be there and bringing in two different perspectives is equally important, but you cannot compare apples to oranges and if you do this ends up frustrating both teams equally resulting in a cold war.

Here is a basic four-tier approach to align sales and marketing, which might work for you.

1.??????Use sales and marketing metrics: invest in automation

To get here, you need to rewind yourself to have metrics ready. ?Does your team know how many leads they need to bring and how many closures are needed per month? How many leads agree to a demo? How many SQLs convert to sales?

The software has to capture your organizational goals from a bottom-up approach. If you are looking for brand awareness apart from sales closures, then it has to capture your outbound marketing efforts and give you insights on awareness campaigns.

2.????Identifying sales qualified leads (SQL)

This is a do-or-die situation for both sales and marketing. While marketing expects sales to respond to all leads immediately, sales will take a more phased-out approach to close or follow up with qualified leads. Sales won’t spend time on bad leads whereas marketing will try to understand why it is labeled as a bad lead. Setting up the cadences is important, as what qualifies as a junk lead and what is the process for a cold lead? The marketing automation software allows you to define cadences and processes to the extent to qualify a cold lead to a hot lead.

3.????Agree on value prop and messaging

Marketers are brand conscious, and more empathetic about consumer behavior and needs whereas sales focus on pain points and solutions. A great value prop and key message should address both. While marketing campaigns are built to nurture leads with thought leadership content, sales prefer direct messages with a call to action in the first or second line. Most brands follow a two-phased approach where direct messaging is used for conversion and thought leadership content is used for engagement and awareness at the top of the funnel.

4.????Align a sense of urgency, and have regular meetings between Marketing & Sales

Constant feedback from sales is important for marketing, the hungry nature they have, they need to know what happened to X lead, and why Z lead stopped responding. Giving marketing feedback requires facts and facts, not vague answers or assumptions. The sense of urgency has to be aligned where both teams treat the lead equally important to connect and revert it back to a cold lead for marketing to nurture.

C-level has a major role to play in aligning sales and marketing, it won’t happen by nature because they come from different planets. It won’t happen automatically because they think differently. This is where leaders need to define cadences and goals for both teams and have joint regular meetings with consistent feedback and guidance for both teams.

When both teams learn to respect and accept their differences, love, and bottom line will grow exponentially ;)