April 2009 

By Catherine Proulx, Managing Director, Twist Marketing

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about one of the common causes of the disconnect between sales and marketing in most companies: the lack of a clearly defined role for marketing. This week, I’ll discuss another common problem. Or rather, a symptom. The feeling that many sales people have that the marketing department is out of touch with their needs.

How many times have you heard that, as a marketer, you have no idea what it’s really like “out in the field” or what customers really want or what the competition is doing or… you get the idea. Even worse, how many times have you heard your colleagues in Marketing utter disparaging words about the “idiots” in Sales? Left untreated, this disconnect spells certain doom. It will undermine Marketing and Sales effectiveness, and negatively impact revenue, reputation and your overall brand.

So why do we accept this disconnect? Why is it that we don’t build a bridge across the crevasse separating Marketing and Sales? The answer all too often is that no one knows how to build that bridge. If this is you, read on. You are not alone and you can fix the problem.

Sales and Marketing are usually not far apart in their view of the market and the opportunities that are out there. The disconnect appears when they get together to compare notes: How often does marketing go out on sales calls? How many focus groups do sales people sit in on? The problem is that they each have their own perspective on the same problem and we are all taught to look after our own territory and stay out of others. For salespeople, if they don’t look after their own territory, they can quickly find themselves out of a job.

Here’s what you as a marketer can do to start bridging the crevasse today:

• Instead of telling Sales what you know, initiate group discussions to define and validate what you know.
• Talk to salespeople about the challenges they face on a daily basis to make sure you really do know what’s happening in the field and to show them that you are genuinely interested in hearing what they have to say.
• Present to Sales how you can help them with lead generation and nurturing strategies.
• Interview a range of salespeople to profile the ideal client and what qualifies as a “hot lead” in their mind so you can better target lead generation programs.
• Based on your interviews, develop lead generation programs that generate the kinds of leads Sales wants.
• Develop a closed loop reporting system for lead follow up.
• Analyze and measure the effectiveness of your lead generation programs, refine them, let Sales know what you’re doing and why, and repeat.

The Twist: Building a bridge over the crevasse between Marketing and Sales can often be as simple as engaging salespeople in constructive dialogue, listening to their challenges and needs, and then showing them positive results of those dialogues in the form of leads they can use to close deals.


For more marketing articles, please visit www.twistmarketing.com/resources