Why sales and marketing need to work together

If there’s one area of business that has changed enormously over the last ten years, it’s marketing.

In many ways, it feels like sales hasn’t changed nearly as much. While the methods might have changed, it’s still fundamentally about talking to the right people and saying the right things.

You still need to find the right prospects, have good conversations, develop relationships, look after customers and identify opportunities to grow those accounts.

Marketing is different.

Digital opened up new channels and new ways of reaching people, but it also meant that people are further down the consideration path and may have counted you in or out already.

Social media changed how businesses communicate with customers and how customers talk to each other about you.

And now AI is changing things again.

There are more ways of talking to the right people than before.

You might therefore expect sales and marketing to have become more closely connected.

In lots of businesses, I think the opposite has happened. They’ve drifted apart at exactly the point when they need to work more closely together.

I talk a little more about why I think sales and marketing need to work together, and how I see the relationship between them, in this short video.

Different disciplines, shared responsibility

Sales and marketing clearly have different roles to play, but they are intrinsically linked right along the purchase journey … and actually beyond.

There isn’t a neat line where one stops and the other takes over.

I tend to think of sales and marketing a bit like a DNA helix. There are two separate strands, but they’re intertwined all the way through.

Where the gaps start to appear

You can often see the disconnect in fairly everyday situations.

Marketing is generating leads, but sales doesn’t think they’re the right leads. Sales is having useful conversations with customers, but what they’re learning isn’t necessarily finding its way back into the marketing.

Perhaps both sides have a slightly different idea of the type of customer the business really wants, or the focus of one is customer acquisition whilst the other sees the opportunity as maximising lifetime value.

Both sides may be working incredibly hard, but the activity isn’t connected.

And when that happens, opportunities are missed, effort duplicated and what should be a harmonious team ends up working at cross-purposes.

Getting sales and marketing working together

For me, this starts with some fairly straightforward conversations.

Who are we actually trying to reach? What does a good opportunity look like? What are customers telling us? What happens when somebody engages with the marketing? What does sales need from marketing? And what is sales learning that could help marketing?

These questions affect the entire business and are about delivering the revenue number.

It is also crucial that the leaders in both departments come to the table with a view to understanding how the two need to come together and finding ways to do that.

The conversation needs to revolve around the whole customer journey and identifying the best levers to pull to increase performance and drive revenue as effectively as possible.

I speak both languages, maybe I should join the UN?

I’ve spent a lot of my career working across both sales and marketing, and I see time and again that practical in-depth knowledge of both is a real asset.

I understand the conversations sales needs to have and how a sale is positioned, but I also understand how marketing can create and support those opportunities too.

That means I can see where the two aren’t joining up and help get the right people talking about the right things.

On a scale of 1-10, how well connected are sales and marketing in your business?

If you are not scoring them 8 or above, you are leaving money on the table and maybe it’s time to get someone to solve that issue.