What is the secret to truly connecting Marketing and Sales? Keys to closing the gap

[zihadhasan012]

At the beginning of my career in Marketing , I saw the Sales team as the enemy. I started working in a call center, an environment where reps idolized Gordon Gekko and their favorite movie was “The Price of Ambition.”

They were seasoned reps who saw me as the marketing lady , too inexperienced to spot a potential customer even if she bumped into me. I was in my twenties, blogging since 1998 and building websites on GeoCities since the mid-nineties.

It was 2005 and I thought I had my place, even though I was still a junior marketing professional. I was arrogant and they were right. I didn’t know anything about lead generation or what it meant to capture a high-quality lead.

At the time, my definition of a good lead was getting a first name, last name, and phone number. Then, salespeople had to call them and close the sale. That's how I saw it.

My job was to get numbers for them to try to close sales. It didn't matter whether these people needed what was being sold or not.

"Convert the leads I'm giving you" or, as the sales team's favorite movie says: " If you can't convert the leads you've received, you can't convert anything ."

The marketing team was not strategic. We weren't even working on getting leads.

I would come in early every morning to find an email with 100 leads to distribute. I would download them, print them out, and assign them, writing the sales reps’ names in the top left corner of the paper. I would then hand the contacts over to them and go about my day.

As they were calling the leads, I was receiving feedback from the salespeople. Many of them sent me back papers with notes, telling me what I had done wrong.

"They thought they were competing to win a free car."
"There is no one with that name who has this number."
"This person's first name says Batman."
The sales executives were right, the leads were terrible and the worst thing was that our communication had serious problems.

The relationship between Marketing and Sales was switzerland phone number list broken and the teams saw each other as enemies. We were not aligned on our goals and we did not discuss what we could do to improve.

But that was in another time, I was another marketing professional.

Fast forward 15 years and I see things completely differently. Sales is not the enemy. We need each other to be successful .

As I developed my career and became much more humble, I began to see the direct impact that a unified team can have on overall Marketing and Sales performance.

Working with a more unified Sales and Marketing team means Marketing leaders must take a deep look at processes, goals, and strategies to find the best way to align these two groups.

And this is no easy task, but avoiding it and working in isolation will only cause friction and limit the potential of both teams to thrive and achieve their goals.

"Thinking of marketing and sales as two parts of a healthy, communicative relationship leads to more effective problem solving."