Can’t we all just get along?
No.
Snide comments and character assassination aside, there are good reasons why sales and marketing are not that well aligned. I’ve read dozens of articles explaining how much value there is in getting sales and marketing on the same page, ending the war. It sounds very sweet, but it also sounds like a good way to screw up two disparate functions.
The misalignment isn’t really about the usual war: Sales says marketing isn’t doing its job–the leads are junk and they need a lot more of them. Marketing says sales wouldn’t know a good lead if it bit them on the butt.
Consultants and pundits focus on the misalignment, and the different compensation models of sales and marketing, and come up with nice charts and graphs showing how lovely it will be if everyone plays nice. I am far more optimistic about peace in the Middle East. And I suspect companies that focus on having sales and marketing working hand in hand might be leaving business on the table by compromising either or both functions.
I know that there are success stories of companies that have dramatically improved close rates and increased revenue by getting sales and marketing to walk hand-in-hand. Just as there would be success stories that show the same increase a few years later if we tore those two lovebirds apart. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. A company that is so concerned about sales and marketing alignment undoubtedly has a serious problem. Regardless of HOW you fix a problem, if you spend time and energy on an issue you will generally see some improvement for a while.
Bottom line–your mileage WILL vary, and gains made during high effort are usually not sustainable day-to-day.
There are a host of reasons why Sales and Marketing don’t, and probably shouldn’t play nice. I think the most important one is that Sales is a transaction-based game, and Marketing is not. If you optimize the way that sales engages with prospects and closes transactions you widen the breach.
I say, so what. Make those sales. But if the sales force is knocking the quota ball out of the park, they will soon come to believe they are the only reason revenue happens. That’s okay, let them have their little delusions. But don’t let it spread. The danger is that management will become intoxicated with immediate success and fail to stay the course of building a platform that supports longer term goals of growth, profit and stability.
Management must recognize how narrowly focused and unique that transactional viewpoint has to be. Sales gains attention one person at a time, and their approach doesn’t change much–they try to sell, and it’s irritating as hell. Do YOU enjoy getting sales calls? It’s appropriate for sales and completely wrong for marketing.
It’s like herding sheep. If you let the dogs chase the sheep around all the time they get nervous, skinny, and some will run away. You want to minimize the interruptions while you are cultivating the prospects to the point they can be sold to, then you send in the dogs to round them up for shearing. Very few of them come to be sheared on their own, you need the dogs to bring them in.
Marketing must take a far longer viewpoint, building a pipeline and going beyond the current transaction to turn customers into evangelists. They need to take a broad selection of approaches, and communicate with prospects according to where they are on the sales cycle. A company can’t afford to piss the prospect off and lose permission to talk with them. They have to give the prospect the information they want and need. If marketing is driven by sales, the lead focus will be on prospects that can close very quickly or the elephants that take all year but yield the big wins. The only prospects you target will be the economic decision makers. All you need to do is look at how your company makes purchases to realize how wrong that is.
When people talk about getting the sales force and marketing aligned, they are generally speaking about forming a consensus about what an ideal customer and hence an ideal lead would be. They also look to some agreement about processes, handoffs, and follow up for leads. What that really means is brokering some compromise between what marketing believes they need to do and what sales wants. But the difference between what sales wants and marketing needs to do is not philosophical, it’s functional. Coming to some compromise makes both sides less effective.
The sales force may show success by intercepting a sales process that is already underway and outselling the competition. In fact that’s the kind of deal that sales loves best. But it’s not an approach that you can build into a platform, or that a company can use for long-term growth. It leaves big holes that your competition can claim as their own and eventually overrun you from. It is far better to find prospects when they are absolutely not ready to talk to a sales person. When all that they feel is some pain, and they are starting to look for a solution. Marketing can afford to enter and maintain a conversation with them and everyone like them. Sales cannot.
Achieving better alignment by focusing on processes and sharing a clearer view of the customer, agreeing on success metrics and the ideal lead is far less important than ensuring that marketing understand what sales needs. Build a platform that delivers those leads to them in as efficient a manner as possible and sales will be satisfied if not happy. Sales people are not going to take the time to understand and observe the processes that surround doing that well. If they do, they are probably not great salespeople. Lacking an understanding of the process they will say “give us all the leads, we’ll work them all” and then they’ll complain about the poor quality.
On the flip side, any marketer that gives the sales force unqualified leads that have not been matured to the point that they are sales-ready simply deserves what happens to them. You will lose credibility and the sales force will consider every lead you hand them to be a liability–a way for them to lose credit for closing sales. Especially when every “hot” lead they fail to close is a black mark against them.
So How Can You Work With Sales?
First of all, marketing doesn’t work WITH sales, we work FOR sales. That may make you twitch, it certainly does me, but it’s the simple truth. The only reason marketing exists is to support sales efforts. That sales effort may be a shopping cart, or a salesperson, but that’s what our work aims at. There may be a long interceding dance, but the purpose is always the same. That doesn’t mean marketing should take their marching orders from sales–they are not and should not be competent to form those orders.
The way to best work for sales is to keep every non-selling task off their desk. That’s equally true if your sales force is 500 lead-starved field sales professionals or an automated website. The work of sales is to sell. The work of marketing is to create and nurture awareness, pain and interest, convert that interest to consideration, cue up the sale, close the loop afterwards, and optimize the customer.
Here are the things that sales and marketing need to agree on:
- The outline of a lead definition, and the process for refining the lead definition
- The map of the sales cycle
- The points where sales gets involved
Everything else is marketing’s responsibility. Certainly you can get feedback from the sales force on the lead to sales conversion process. You can create reports on the market intelligence you’re gathering and offer them to sales. You can gather insights gained from customer feedback so the sales force at least knows about them. But the most precious thing to the sales force is selling time. Optimize the time they can spend selling and you are doing your job brilliantly.
Sales is a microcosm of Pareto’s rule–80/20. Twenty precent of the sales force is doing great, and eighty precent is sucking wind. There are always superstars, and there is always dead meat struggling to keep their job. The superstars have no time for you, your processes, your bright ideas. They want good leads, but if you don’t supply them they’ll get the job done anyway. And they will succeed, the superstars always do. Respect them, but don’t build your platform around them. There are far too few of them and you can’t do that much to help them. Certainly don’t let them drive your marketing efforts–they have no comprehension of what the sales team needs, or how the entire funnel can or should be filled. Might as well ask Michael Jordan to teach high school gym, or Lewis Hamilton to teach driver’s ed.
The dead meat on the way out the door is only too happy to cooperate with marketing, especially if it might provide a stay of execution. Their problem can’t be solved by your process, in fact they will underperform on any leads you give them. They can’t sell your product. If they can’t do that, they can’t help you.
When you want to talk to someone in sales (and you should–frequently) talk to the middle folks. The ones that are doing a plodding job. The ones that struggle to make quota but generally do. They have more to gain from good leads and they generally know what to do with them. You can gain traction there because they will spare some time to work on things you ask them to–they need the help. On rare occasion you’ll find a superstar that has enough foresight to realize that better leads can make them more money, but superstars HAVE to believe that their success comes from their performance and nothing else. Sales is hard, being a sales superstar is extremely hard and requires talent. Believing in themselves above anything else is how they do what they do.
Enough about the interface between sales and marketing, you either believe me on this point or you don’t. Let’s talk about the sales funnel, how we fill it, and how we move prospects from the wide end where they should never talk to a salesperson to the pointy end where they must.