Sales and marketing: why can’t we all just get along?

I had dinner the other night with an old friend and colleague. At present, she’s the virtual VP of marketing at a start up, and is butting heads with the actual VP of sales.

Nothing we haven’t seen before, I’m afraid. (If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then the world’s oldest intra-company battle has got to be between sales and marketing.)

Sounds like I’m taking sides here: my marketing friend against some obnoxious suit.

Well, sure I am.

But my friend is an enormously talented and experienced marketer, used to marketing difficult, early-to-market, expensive, complex products with a lots of intangibles attached to them. And, by the way, she’s also used to selling these difficult, etc. products - which gives her a ton of credibility, in my book, when it comes to the sales vs. marketing thing.

What my friend is dealing with is a sales person who wants to boss marketing around, relegating the function (and my friend) to doing whatever it is they want done: write me a data sheet, go announce something, order some logo golf balls why don’t you. Go fetch. And, while your at it, gimme some more of these lousy leads. Better yet, get me a real lead. You know the kind I mean - the one that tells me to show up on July 22nd on the 14th floor of the Acme Widget building and see the receptionist. who’ll have the contract for me. Now that’s a lead.

This type of sales person - either because they’re completely arrogant and/or not too bright and/or pig-headed, or because they have no idea what good marketing can do because they’ve never really worked with good marketing - is truly ghastly to work with. (As for working for them. Don’t even go there. I maintain that no self-respecting marketing person wants to work under sales. If anything, sales should be under marketing. So there.)

What some sales folks don’t get (mostly, I’m afraid, because they’ve never experienced is) is that strong, directive marketing can and will their lives easier by helping define products that the market wants, but identifying the audience most likely to be receptive to products and messages, by creating tools that help facilitate the buying process, by making sure that “the story” is clear and compelling, and that the world knows that story.

Marketing’s job, in my view, is actually pretty simple: it’s to make a company’s products easier to sell and easier to buy.

Why wouldn’t a salesperson want and appreciate that?

Maybe I seem a bit too harsh about sales here, and I do want to say that I have enormous respect for the work that sales folks do. I couldn’t do it, that’s for sure. And I absolutely think that they should have the potential to be the highest paid employees in any company - or at least among them. What they do is pretty black and white: you get results or you don’t. I want those sales folks to get results!

And I absolutely appreciate that there has to be a balance between the short term needs of sales (get those quarterly results), and the long term horizon that marketing’s generally more concerned with (long run growth).

I don’t have the answer here.

But there’s got to be a way for sales and marketing people to get along. An it can’t just be by having marketing roll over, sit up and beg, shake hands, or fetch a stick at the master’s command.

Guarantee that’s not going to work - especially for my friend.

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