Sales and Marketing, two sides of the same coin – Focus on the COIN!

I have looked up several materials from thought leaders on this “war” and honestly, it's not peculiar to one industry, country, or region, it cuts across all spheres.

“When sales are disappointing, Marketing blames the sales force for its poor execution of an otherwise brilliant rollout plan. The sales team, in turn, claims that Marketing sets prices too high and uses too much of the budget, which instead should go toward hiring more salespeople or paying the sales reps higher commissions. More broadly, sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what’s really going on with customers. Marketing believes the sales force is myopic—too focused on individual customer experiences, insufficiently aware of the larger market, and blind to the future. In short, each group often undervalues the other’s contributions. This lack of alignment ends up hurting corporate performance”. – Philip Kotler

Switching from Sales to Marketing in the middle of my career positioned me to see things from a total business point of view. I specialized in Marketing for my first degree, and then started my career in sales, I am very close to many of the points of discords between both functions, however, I have always tried to maintain a balance, firstly, because I understood the theories behind market share, demand generation, penetration, etc. early enough, and secondly because finding a balance has always been second nature to me – remember I am a middle child. But what is the source of these wars, are they necessary, how much business time can it waste, are we in the days of synergizing both functions, or is it a little too soon?

There are two sources of tension between Sales and Marketing. One is economic, and the other is cultural.

The economic tension is spawned by the need to split the total budget granted by senior management to support Sales and Marketing. In fact, the sales force is apt to criticize how Marketing spends money on three of the four P’s—pricing, promotion, and product.

Take pricing. The marketing group is under pressure to achieve revenue goals hence taking prices for higher turnover vs the previous period. The salespeople usually favor lower prices because they can sell the product more easily and because low prices make negotiations easier.

The cultural conflict between Sales and Marketing is more deep-rooted than the economic conflict. This is true in part because the two functions attract different types of people with varying interests.

Marketers are expected to be highly analytical, data-oriented, and project-focused. They’re all about building a competitive advantage for the future. They judge their projects’ performance with a cold eye, and they’re ruthless with failed initiatives. However, that performance focus doesn’t always look like action to their colleagues in Sales because it all happens behind a desk rather than out in the field. Salespeople, in contrast, spend their time talking to existing and potential customers. They’re skilled relationship builders; they’re not only savvy about customers’ willingness to buy but also attuned to which product features will fly and which will die. They want to keep moving. They’re used to rejection, and it doesn’t depress them. They live for closing a sale. It’s hardly surprising that these two groups of people find it difficult to work well together. The upshot of the inevitable tribal mentalities is damage to customer interests and the organization.

All too often, marketing and sales are treated as separate entities, rather than two sides of the same coin. Integrating the functions as genuinely unified departments puts the customer at the center of operations. When sales and marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics – sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.”

Research shows that this is exactly what happened when IBM integrated its sales and marketing groups to create a new function called Channel Enablement because of their different departmental orientations, marketing and sales provide complementary information that is valuable for the NPD process.

Marketing provides strategic marketing information, while sales provide specific customer information. Combining this information is critical because it helps avoid niche solutions for an individual customer that in turn, neglect the attractiveness of larger market segments or market trends or are not aligned with the firm’s overall product portfolio.

Based on my experience working across both functions, I recommend the below steps to integrate both functions for your business

1. Functional target alignment with the overall company goal

2. For Multi-Brand/Category organizations – consider recruiting some sales team members as internal Brand Ambassadors

3. Collaborate Always! Use marketing insights for more efficient sales meetings, use sales insights to shape your marketing strategy.

4. Co-Create both long term strategy and tactical plans

5. Build a Trust Culture - No information should be sacred if we work with the same Organization.

6. Cross Breed as much as new openings allow in both functions, at both mid/senior levels.

Integration does not just mean more talking, and it is beyond just exchanging information, that is missing the whole point. It means setting up sustainable processes for both functions to rising above budget and cultural discords of their individual functions to make sure that the focus is on ensuring that the organization wins – both on the shelf and in the consumers’ minds.