Both Sales and Marketing have precious knowledge that becomes even more valuable when it is exchanged—and costly when the exchange of information doesn’t take place. Have you thought about how your employees can work in a salesmarketing plane?
It’s true that successful integration of the sales and marketing functions is difficult. Salespeople claim that marketers are out of touch with customers, while marketers argue that the sales force is too focused on meeting the needs individual customers just to win a deal. The balance between a focus on the overall market verses the individual customer is a difficult equilibrium to achieve.
Even assuming that marketing has a high degree of accountability to revenue (which they don’t always have), their decisions are made with quite a different time horizon than sales—before and after products are rolled out. In contrast, the sales time horizon is now. Naturally, this breeds some degree of tension. Both parties are looking at the same set of facts, but assessing them quite differently.
Yes, both views are critical for each function to do their jobs, but it’s the sharing of these views that is most valuable for companies. No one says it’s going to be easy, but encouraging this integration and alignment will pay off.
