The subtitle to Grays book was “A practical guide for improving communication and getting what you want in your relationship”. This still seems like a contemporarily relevant ambition. In the last 25 years of engagements with senior leaders in business the troubled relationship between marketing and sales has remained stubbornly persistent, in my experience.
When combined in unity, an efficient marketing and sales set up can accelerate time to value, increase market valuation and drive profitabl;e growth at scale. Its a powerful thing done right. So why is it still so elusive? There are three reasons that I have identified over several decades that have stayed consistent.
There is an old adage that sales people are “coin operated” and this is certainly true to an extent. However it is a shallow simplification. Let's look deeper at the people not the title. Sales people are opportunistically driven. They get successful by seizing opportunities presented by customers. They add energy to relationships and win deals by adding urgency to the closing process. This is why we reward salespeople on closing deals not opening conversations, we measure the intensity of their engagement as a predictor of success.
Marketing people are the opposite. They are consequence driven. The measures of marketing success are focused on the consequences of their actions. Return on investment, qualified lead generation, cost per click. These are not opportunistic metrics and the rewards for marketing similarly are driven towards the creation of favourable consequences.
So put a sales person and a marketer in the same room and one will want action right now and the other will want the right action. Our motives define our actions.
So is this a bad thing? Not entirely.
If we recognise that this dynamic exists then we would be wise to exploit it. The marketer operates best at the top end of the funnel and the sales person operates best at the other end. Sales job is essentially to get a signature on an order. Marketing’s role should be to identify the prospect most likely to buy what you sell and get them to the table.
Many organisations make the mistake of confusing these two assuming that marketing exists to “serve” sales. Often this manifests itself in marketing reporting to sales. This works only if the leader responsible understands the difference in the role.
To be successful, the smart leader will start with the entire customer lifecycle and work out what needs to be done where, recognising that reward and motivation go hand in hand and aligning them to the task.
How successful would your finance team be reporting to HR? Would you recruit someone into the legal team on the basis that they’ve worked the reception desk competently? Unlikely. Yet sales leaders are often put in charge of marketing teams.
I’ve worked with more than one business where the CEO sought strategic council about the future value of a market from the sales leader, even though they also had a department with “market” in the title. Marketing should be adding valuable insights on market size, value, growth, penetration and competition. If all that’s asked of marketing is to generate more MQL’s then that's all they will do.
A better approach is to seek to focus each team on the different value they can add to the customer lifecycle. To do this requires insight into what each team is capable of and what each function can deliver. Instead, many senior leaders waste opportunity to accelerate their business performance because they assume sales generates money and marketing spends it. This is too binary and needs challenging because it will not get the best out of the relationship.