We see many companies still suffering from the traditional struggle between the marketing silo and the sales silo inside their businesses. Is this happening in your firm? It doesn’t have to be that way. Frequently, marketing and sales spend too much time and energy competing with each other for resources and a CEO’s attention, as opposed to taking a more enlightened approach: focusing on integrating their efforts in order to optimize the company’s overall revenue growth.
Why is this traditional rivalry so acute in so many businesses today? Well for one thing, part of the root cause stems from the fact that salespeople and marketing often come up through different tracks of the company and are taught different skill sets. Another reason is because they often vie for the same budget resources. As a result, sales and marketing people are sometimes suspicious of each other and view themselves as competitors. Salespeople believe that sales are the only solution for generating more revenue, and often times complain about sales lead quality or promotional program effectiveness. On the other hand, marketing people feel that they provide a much more efficient means for capturing new customers at a lot lower cost, than salespeople.
What most companies fail to understand is the integration of marketing and sales can be a very powerful tool for transforming your company’s business.
If your company is looking to try to integrate its marketing and sales department, you need to start by hiring or recruiting marketing and sales leadership that takes an enlightened, holistic approach to the two disciplines and can integrate the interests of both into a single well-optimized function inside your company. Finding marketing and sales talent at the executive level that understands both disciplines is not an easy task for the reasons that I mentioned before. It’s often difficult to find someone who has both marketing and sales backgrounds, but it’s essential.
sales
marketing