When working in various organisations I have found the relationship between sales and marketing to be tempestuous. In my experience the friction has usually been caused by a combination of sales’ dismissive attitude to marketing as a fluffy department who’s contribution to the business amounts to the brochures being printed on time and marketing's resentment of sales recognition for closing deals combined with a lack of recognition of marketing’s contribution to the achievement of sales targets.
Personally I think it is Marketing’s responsibility to improve this relationship. It will always be easy to lay the blame for poor relations on other individuals or departments but by being proactive and actively trying to improve relations I have found it can only have a positive impact on marketing’s performance as well as the perception of marketing’s contribution to the business as a whole.
It all boils down to the old adage W.I.I.F.M (what’s in it for me?)
- Why should sales care about the branding campaigns you have running?
- Why should they care about your organic rankings in Google?
- Why should they be bothered about the turnout to your last client training day?
- What’s in it for them?
Everyday marketers apply this rule to each and every campaign and action aimed at our clients and prospects but we sometimes fail to flip it over and apply the same logic to members of the sales team we’re trying to get involved in marketing. Although the answer to 'What's in it for sales? may be clear to you as a marketer, you sometimes still have to spell it out to the rest of the organisation. And nothing gets through to those you need to listen like impacting bottom line figures on the order book!
Previously I have worked with sales teams to identify the source of their new business (ergo commission). This is the sort of marketing information that sales people really value - as it is this insight that helps them work smarter not harder to get more out of their individual sales performance. If you have accurate performance measurement in place you can show that an event generated £xx,xxx in new business or a direct mail campaign generated xx% increase in meeting requests via the website. A sales person is often only considered as good as their last commission sheet and if you can show how marketing can improve that commission you will get sales buy in and create marketing advocates within the business.
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