Sales and marketing types basically fall into two types; Those who can work together and those who can’t. These two step-brothers can cause great pain for one another or work together smoothly if you build your team right. At its core marketing exists to drive sales leads of one type or another to the sales reps, cash registers or sign-up page. Of course there are a ton of other things a marketing department must do, but that’s for another post. Having seen and experienced first hand both the aforementioned scenarios, I can say what has worked in my experiences.
- Integrate Sales & Marketing – You may think segregating these two bodies makes the most sense, but in my experience the opposite is true. First, consolidate the team members and put them in the same room, floor or office even! Sales needs marketing to keep them honest and marketing needs sales to bounce ideas and hear the process. Your marketing team should be driving sales leads and narrowing down what prospects are most interested in will help everyone.
- One Team Mentality – Sales thinks marketing doesn’t drive leads, marketing thinks sales doesn’t follow-up with leads that they’re given. This chicken and egg scenario happens across every industry in every split situation. Stress the fact that they are all on the same team and will have to hold each other accountable.
- Compensate – This is more for the marketing side of the house, but consider compensating the marketing team on leads that they drive that the reps close. Tying the whole dept to revenue and rewarding on revenue earned acts a great motivator and keeps those hungry marketing engines running.
It may make some on the team happy, but combining these two departments will ultimately lead to a better functioning sales and marketing segment – or what I like to call the car and the gas. Gas makes the Car go, vroom vroom.