Sales and marketing activities need to be tightly integrated for an organization to be successful in the market place.  Though they are pursuing common objectives, the thread remains that they don’t get along well with each other. The common arguments that are put forward are:

• Sales are the bread winners, hence they need to be deified; Marketing are the strategic brainy ones who position the offerings in the market place
• Sales wonder why they have to generate and nurture leads; marketing wonder why they have to pass leads to sales when they are not acted on
• Marketing and Sales, both belittle the others contribution to the growth of the organization

Well, it is agreed that they have differences and they need to be solved. It necessarily needs to be aligned and they should progress forward and for which some of the steps that ought to be followed are:

• Top management needs to toe the line and give thumbs up to ensuring alignment. In most cases, top management is too sales-centric as they are mainly concerned about the short-term as opposed to long-term.
• There needs to be integrated marketing and sales funnel, where every activity and every spend is directly linked to the revenues
• Both sales and marketing should agree on definitions of what a lead is, what a prospect is and to a smaller extent, what a customer is.
• Most prospects that come into the funnel are not sales ready, hence it needs to reside with marketing and have to be nurtured before it is handed off to sales. Many a times, sales gets restless and wants even a small door of opportunity to be passed to them and it makes the lead fall
• Specifically measure lead volume and lead quality; measure how leads are progressing with sales; provide access to both marketing and sales
• Sales and marketing should party together when it comes to positioning, value proposition, offers and customer segments.

I will cover in detail on how these steps can be implemented in my future posts.

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