The relationship between sales and marketing

It has taken marketing a long time to get a sense of autonomy and equality with sales, but does increased collaboration mean they’re likely to merge? Joel Harrison, editor-in-chief at B2B Marketing, reports

Roundtable summary: The relationship between sales and marketing with OgilvyOne Business and B2B Marketing

The relationship between sales and marketing is without doubt one of the key areas that makes B2B distinct as a marketing sector – it’s also potentially one of the key challenges facing marketers.

The arrival of digital technologies and channels and more savvy and empowered buyers have turned accepted notions of sales and marketing relationships on their head. As a result, both sales and marketing teams have had to adapt to a new landscape and found new ways to work with one another – effective collaboration has become more critical than ever.

This begs the question: are the longstanding and entrenched barriers between sales and marketing actually starting to break down as both sides strive to adapt? Are we moving back to a time when marketing and sales can co-exist happily within a single unified department? And is this something that is actually of interest to anyone within marketing?

These are some of the questions this roundtable sought to address. The event was attended by senior marketers from a variety of B2B sectors and run in association with OgilvyOne Business. It took place at the Hospital Club in London’s Covent Garden in October. Below is a summary of some of the key thoughts and conclusions from those in attendance:

Sales still (often) rules the roost

Despite all the progress that’s been made in empowering and developing marketing, sales still dominates over marketing in many organisations. It uses its proximity to the client and its experience of closing deals to drive what it wants from marketing. This is particularly the case in large organisations or those with particularly complex sales cycles. Marketing is more used to making sacrifices in its agenda for the overall corporate good than sales is.

Marketing is from Venus, sales is from Venus too?!

Generally speaking, the relationship between marketing and sales is harmonious among attendees. They are fairly well aligned with one another, and collaborate well. This sense of harmony is often a result of having a senior figure in marketing who is a peer of the senior sales people, and, therefore, able to engage with them at the same level and fight marketing’s corner (where necessary). Alignment requires buy-in and support from the top down – if the powers that be in the organisation don’t demonstrably value marketing, then it’s hard for others to do so.

Vision is key to success in marketing

The relationship between sales and marketing can be more strained within organisations with a more disparate hierarchy and lots of different divisions. This requires a strong centralised marketing function to provide a solid central vision for marketing, and consistency on execution and alignment. Without this, firms risk a ‘weak centre’, which at best hampers the effectiveness of marketing and, at worst, completely undermines it.

Lead definition remains a key battleground

This is particularly the case for organisations who rely on third-party distributors.

Identification of where the lead comes from in the first place is always difficult, as is defining lead handover criteria that everyone agrees on. In other organisations, the absence of a robust CRM platform hampers marketers’ ability to work effectively with sales. Creating clearly defined rules of engagement around leads or a shared value proposition is key to collaboration. 

Digital marketing has changed everything

Organisations are realising that the emotional linkage and individual relationship with the client isn’t everything – buyers can choose what content they want to consume, where and when, and this changes the engagement dynamic. Marketing has woken up to this, and is planning its activities accordingly, but sales is taking longer to come to terms with the implications of this.

Automation changes the game

Marketing automation has the potential to deliver much more respect for the marketing team. Marketing can clearly demonstrate the kind of engagement that it has achieved, and the number of client ‘touches’ that were required to get to the point of handover to sales. In other words, sales understands what marketing is doing. It helps sales people on the ground buy in to marketing.

Irreconcilable differences?

Marketing and sales have a fundamentally different ethos. Despite all the new technology and increases in sophistication, each business function is different at the very core. Marketing is increasingly driven by science, but in sales, the top performers are seen as ‘naturals’, with an innate ability to succeed in this role.

Marketing needs to stay focused

There is little enthusiasm for a merging of sales and marketing. Attendees believed that it is a path that some organisations could conceivably pursue, but is not likely to happen any time soon. A widely shared view was that a merger would result in a blurring of boundaries that would inevitably result in a loss of focus on marketing’s priorities, with emphasis shifting to sales. There would also be other functions relating to marketing that would sit outside of this merged department; including social media and PR. It would be hard to imagine how they would fit in to the wider structure.

Failure to collaborate elsewhere

There is less evidence for collaboration elsewhere. It seems marketing often still has a fairly fractious relationship with HR and IT.

IT was described as ‘transactional’ in its attitude, and resistant to change. HR was described as a barrier in terms of providing access to certain key groups within the organisation who are key to customer relations. Compared to that, marketing’s relationship with sales looks extremely harmonious – even cosy.

Is ‘customer experience’ the future?

Marketing is unlikely to ‘own’ the customer in most B2B organisations. If it’s not the sales team, then the customer care/customer success team is likely to own the customer, or the engineers with direct customer contact. Some organisations are developing customer experience departments, combining marketing, sales, customer service and other functions. But there is little evidence of this
in practice.

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