The Love Relationship Between Marketing and Sales

Marketing and Sales Silos Be Gone

I began my career in technology sales….After ten years in sales I transitioned to marketing…After ten years in corporate marketing positions, I launched my agency…During my years in corporate positions (both sales and marketing) I remember the silos being obstacles. The turf wars were downright silly. Sales always wanted more value from marketing, and marketing always expected more results from sales.

In the current age, the availability of marketing technology has enabled sales and marketing to collaborate more than ever before. But, in my agency experience working with clients across many B2B industries, the silos remain.

Today, the marketing department is expected to create brand awareness, generate demand, conduct campaigns and hand over qualified leads to sales. While marketing is busy filling the funnel through content marketing, outbound marketing and inbound marketing, the CRM system configuration necessitates an intelligent approach to scoring leads so that sales only gets the leads that meet the “qualification criteria.”

And, the silos remain…

Here’s how Sarah Goodall frames it up when addressing the silo mindset between sales and marketing.

“I suggest we both need to shift our effort, focus and budget to a united sales and marketing model that attracts audiences to our brand. A model where customers want to engage with us.

Less pushing. More pulling.

So what do you reckon? How about we make 2016 the year where we align around the customer and not just around the numbers?”

Sarah nails it! Read her full article on LinkedIn here. Sarah is making the case for a strategy that centers on attracting the customer to engage with us by providing enough insight and value so that the customer wants to engage with us.

Since aligning sales and marketing has been such a long-standing challenge in business, maybe it’s time we shake up the org chart? Maybe it’s time we have a C-Level person focused on the customer’s entire journey with a brand….Not just customer service.

I’d like to see a C-Level leader responsible for the entire customer’s journey starting with the top of the funnel customer attraction, all the way through purchase and ongoing support. This approach would require sales and marketing to be aligned around the customer under one common boss.

What if the entire customer journey was owned by one C-Level exec? Maybe….Just maybe, we’d finally have alignment between sales and marketing.

Read more:

• The Relationship Between Sales and Marketing