Sell Marketing to Sales

Yes you read it right.

As a Marketing Professional, I always knew this is top priority. This, not only, brings visibility to Marketing’s contribution but since Sales is Marketing’s customer and without their buy-in all my efforts would go waste. Having been in Services Marketing, I have seen there is a constant cry on the lack of Sales & Marketing alignment and the negative impact it can have on an organization.

Let us look at one area of constant pain and very fertile ground for debate - LEADS.

Marketing exhibits numerous activities and campaigns that demonstrate generation of leads, yet Sales never has enough opportunities in the pipeline to meet their revenue targets. Paradox?

It is extremely easy to look at numbers and immediately point fingers at Sales. STOP. What if I tell you, consider this perspective - Marketing maybe at fault. That’s right. Marketing’s responsibility is to generate qualified opportunities in the target market segment and equip the Sales team with the competitive tools so that they can close & win deals. In today’s business, there is a heightened need for qualified leads by the Sales teams. If we evaluate from this perspective then consider some scenarios:

• Marketing has generated the wrong leads, run campaigns along the ‘wrong’ target market (BAD)
• Marketing has put lead generation processes and programs in place that are broken (WORSE)
• Marketing has a credibility issue with Sales (WORST)

Selling Marketing to Sales is not just the matter of increasing Marketing’s visibility but also ensuring credibility and alignment with Sales. It is the ability to look at how to deliver real ‘lift’ revenue by delivering qualified leads to the pipeline and requires Marketing to view Sales’ perspective.

Comments

[Christian Bernard]

Hello Subramaniam,

This is very true. We see such misalignment often with our clients.

There is another oportunity to have sales and marketing teams better work together. It is in business planning.

This activity is disjointed at many companies. Very often you find marketing being very focussed at planning tactical campaigns, finance being busy at prolonging historical product sales, and in the end sales get their number (i.e. revenue goal) from the top (Stock Exchange expectations).

This is too often done without seriously evaluating market opportunities, and without much creativity in go-to-market strategies. Or the work is done at worldwide level (!) but very rarely at regional/country level.

This is where the various teams facing markets, including channel partners, should work together and define the strategic ways (longer term) by which they will develop their presence in carefully chosen target markets. This leverages all experiences and skills in order to evaluate market potential, customer behaviour, and competitors strategies.

Every new year tactical budget planning should then be derived from above conclusions. It makes business planning much more relevant, exciting, and coherent. And execution can only benefit from such an integrated approach.

Kind regards, Christian