Bridging the Marketing and Sales Gap

If you feel like your marketing and sales teams aren't working in tandem, you're not alone. Collaboration across sales networks is rife with inefficiency and missed business opportunity.

The Blame Game
"Marketing didn't provide us with quality materials or advertising support."

"Sales doesn't use the materials we created and they aren't following up on their leads."

So who's to blame? They both are. Often times, sales reps don't really have a place to go where they can find the most current product and marketing materials or they don't like the materials they have available. On the sales side, leads aren't followed up on and valuable data gathered in the field is either not captured or is not reported back to the marketing department.

According to a 2007 Socratic Technologies survey, collaboration between sales, marketing and the field needs an overhaul:

• 58% of info that sales gathers is not passed back to marketing
• 57% of the time, marketing cannot track what sales/marketing materials were used
• 51% of sales reps often use outdated documentation
• 43% found it difficult for sales reps to find the documents they need

SocialText, a social software company entrenched in Web 2.0 technology explains that this communication gap is not the fault of sales or marketing, but rather a lack of efficient collaboration and learning between the two teams.

Knowledge and content creation is largely done in a vacuum. Without
feedback loops between marketing, sales and the field -- communication is less
effective and there is a lack of quality in prepared materials. Insight from the
trenches stays isolated and what little feedback occurs goes unrecognized.
Content generated is often duplicated, dated, lacks effective version control
and the right content is hard to find. Isolated data sources not only result in
tactical error, but they are viewed sequentially, which is less efficient. The
lack of confidence in materials and lack of feedback loops not leads to
uninformed sales people pushing presentations, collateral and demos -- but it
also erodes trust between departments while customers are left with vendors
selling in ways they don't want to buy.

Working In a Vacuum
I couldn't agree more with the SocialText assessment. As a former marketing manager for a regional bank, I was often amazed and frustrated by the fact that the majority of our marketing materials were created in a vacuum. The primary emphasis of the creative director was to stay on brand and work within the parameters of a brand template. Marketing managers were presented with layouts and copy that the creative team had developed without any input or feedback from the sales team. This "take it or leave it" mentality from our creative manager made it difficult when we, as strategic marketing managers, had to present the materials to our internal clients. The marketing managers as a whole rarely bought into the creative, so how were we suppose to sell it down the line?

The Sales Silo
In this same banking environment, sales primarily operated in it's own silo. In one particular instance, I arranged for the bank to participate in a professional seminar as a primary sponsor. During the day, we collected more than 200 banking sales leads which I passed on to our sales team. Those leads disappeared into a black hole with no reporting or feedback from sales. There was no accountability.

Together In Harmony
Companies can bridge the gap if they would simply agree to communicate and collaborate. As the marketing manager for a Swiss-based manufacturing company, I saw first hand how it "should" work. We held quarterly sales meetings with a segment of the meeting dedicated to discussing sales and marketing. Sales would present feedback from their experiences with customers that often included direct feedback from customers -both good and bad. From that feedback, we developed marketing materials that we presented to the sales team, distributors and client focus groups before we even considered sending the materials to print. Once we were comfortable with the buy-in from our sales team and our customers, we produced the materials for distribution. Finger pointing between sales and marketing was non-existent.

Getting Your Sales & Marketing Teams On Track
Here is a suggestions for bringing your marketing and sales teams together:

1. Open Forum Meeting - hold an open forum meeting between the marketing and sales teams with no set agenda except to ask everyone to write down and share their answers to one questions, "How can marketing and sales work together more efficiently." The responses will facilitate a discussion that could go on for hours.
   
2. Prioritize the Responses - Determine what the "hot buttons" are. Pair up one member of your sales team and one member of your marketing team to propose solutions to one or two of the issues.
   
3. Follow-Up Meeting - Set a deadline a couple of weeks out for your marketing and sales teams to present their solutions to the entire group. Give each issue the same amount of time, 5-10 minutes and allow up to 10-15 minutes for the group to weigh in on the suggestions. Make each pairing responsible for monitoring the progress of their issues going forward.
   
4. Temperature Checks - Hold regular (monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly) meetings and set the expectation that each duo will report on their issue(s). Have them report on one specific example of what is working and what could be improved. Most importantly, keep the discussion moving in a positive direction.

By getting your marketing and sales teams working together instead of in isolation, you'll start seeing the results in the numbers.

For other ways to get your marketing and sales effort aligned, visit http://www.btkmarketing.com/ or email me at brian@btkmarketing.com.