Marketing & Sales - A Love-Hate Relationship?

Having headed the Marketing & Sales team at my organization over 2 years now, one of the key challenges for me was to identify the intersection between the 2 functions, and to ensure that these functions align more than they compete. While in our particular road-map, we have evolved from a Sales-driven organization to a Marketing-driven organization in the course of last couple of years, in the due course of this blog post, I shall try to answer that question from a more generic standpoint.

In most of the organizations that exist today, Marketing & Sales form 2 separate functions. To make matters worse, more often than not, these 2 groups are perfectly out-of-sync. Whenever Sales is low, Marketing blames the Salesforce for its poor execution capabilities. Salesforce on the other hand, always looks at the features that the product lacks, or how the pricing of a competitor is more attractive, or how the incentives and commissions are not aligned with the efforts that they are putting in. Whereas Marketing department feels that the Salesforce is too myopic, and is unaware of the future & what the bigger picture looks like, Sales department feels that the Marketers are out of touch with the ground reality.

There are 2 major sources of friction between Marketing & Sales: Economic & Cultural.

The Economic friction arises from the need to divide the total budget granted by the Senior Management to support Marketing & Sales. While Marketing always focuses on setting a higher price that has margins aligned with the company, spending on promotions that leads to brand awareness but doesn't evidently translate into sales numbers, and creating product features that have a broad appeal and are aligned with long-term prospects; Salesforce always looks for setting a lesser price that sells easily in the market, spending on product discounts & enhancing the size of Salesforce rather than open-ended budgets on branding & promotions, and looking at product features that gel with their individual customers and will help them close their targets this month or quarter.

The cultural difference, on the other hand, arises due to different kind of people that form a part of both the teams. Marketers on one hand have a more formal bit of education than the Salesforce. They tend to be more analytical, data-oriented and project-focused and try to create a product with a competitive advantage in the future. They evaluate their projects with a cold eye and are ruthless with failed initiatives. Salesforce, on the other hand, spends its time talking to existing and potential customers, tends to be skilled at relationship-building with immaculate people-skills, and is very acclimatized to the product lines & features that fly, and the ones that die. They are used to rejection, and it doesn't affect them. They live for closing a sale. It's not surprising that these 2 groups of people find it difficult to work well together.

In the words of the famous Marketing Guru Philip Kotler, there are 4 stages of relationship between Marketing & Sales. Before we more further, let us have a close look at them.

1. Undefined - This happens when each department focuses on its own tasks, and has been developed independently. Their meetings are more around conflict resolution than anything else.
2. Defined - This happens when there is clear demarcation of activities between Marketing & Sales. They share the same language (e.g. defining a lead), and they use meetings to clarify mutual expectations.
3. Aligned - This happens when there is a clear but flexible set of boundaries between both the departments. The Sales folks use Marketing terminology, and Marketers participate in Sales calls and visits.
4. Integrated - This happens when the both the departments share their performance metrics, and rewards. They behave as if they shall rise and fall together.

For an organization to grow in the right direction and at a healthy pace, both the functions need to align together. When that happens, companies see significant improvement on important performance metrics, sales cycles are shorter and costs go down as well. For that to happen, there needs to be a progression of the relationship between the 2 functions from Undefined to Integrated. Let us look at how that can be achieved.

1. Undefined to Defined - The relationship between both the departments in undefined when the organization is at the nascent stages of its growth trajectory, and the main function of Marketing department is to support the Salesforce. However, in case of constant conflicts, the senior management needs to chip in and ensure that there is a clear demarcation of responsibilities, tasks and associated KPIs, so that each department understands its own boundaries and functions within it.
2. Defined to Aligned - Sometimes, even with the clear differentiation of activities, there might be a lot of duplication of effort. Also in certain cases, the product life cycle is might be shortening, the market may be becoming more commoditized, and the products might be becoming more customized. In such cases, the need of the hour is to create a common business process for managing and measuring revenue-generating activities. Some of the common ways of doing it are encouraging common language and defined communication among them (Marketers to involve Salesforce during the design & development of Marketing collaterals, and Salesforce to involve Marketers during critical account reviews), creating joint tasks (Marketers to involve Salesforce in product-planning meetings, and Salesforce to invite Marketers to field visits & cold calls), co-locating both the functions so that they collaborate & work toward their common goals, and ensuring Sales-force feedback to ensure that the product is in sync with the market expectations.
3. Aligned to Integrated - While having an alignment in the roles & responsibilities of Marketing & Sales departments works well for a small and medium sized entity, the ultimate mile for the departments to work in their best capacity is to integrate into one single unit. This would mean integrating activities like planning, target setting, customer assessment and value-proposition development. Some of the key measures in this regard are combining both the functions are different steps in the same buying funnel (and defining the steps in each funnel), splitting Marketing into 2 groups - Strategic & Tactical, where the former focuses on product roadmap in line with Market-fitment and the latter supports and aligns with the Sales team on collateral roll-outs, market research & consumer feedback, and integrates Sales & Marketing metrics along with common revenue goals and rewards.

Carefully planned enhancements in the aforementioned regard would bring the intimate knowledge of customers to the company's core knowledge base. This would not only help the organization serve the customers better in the present and create better products for the future, it would also help it marry the softer relationship-building skills of the Salesforce with the harder analytical skills of the Marketing department, which would eventually lead to both the top-line and bottom-line growth of the organization.

Note: Inputs taken from HBR's 10MR

About the author: The author of the article is the CMO of Finnovation Tech Solutions Pvt. Ltd., the parent company of the brands KrazyBee (India's Largest Student Credit Platform) and KreditBee (India's Fastest Growing Salary Advance & Short-term Personal Loan Platform for Young Professionals). He is a full-stack Marketing & Sales professional, handling various functions ranging from Digital Marketing, Offline Marketing, Field Sales Management, Tele-Sales (Inside Sales) Management, Customer Support and Business Development over the last 2.5 years for the entity.