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The Launch Pad
April 2004

Sales versus Marketing

There has been a lot of confusion about the roles of sales and marketing over the past few decades. Some people believe sales and marketing are completely interchangeable roles. Look at classified job ads sometime, in the marketing and sales categories. Sometimes you will find marketing jobs that require nothing but sales, and sales positions that require the development of promotional campaigns and marketing materials.

In the real world however, sales and marketing jobs require vastly different skill sets; it’s difficult to find an individual who excels at both. Most companies of any size understand the difference, and have separate sales and marketing departments with detailed, distinct job descriptions. Then where does all this confusion come from? It arises from the fact that the marketing and sales efforts are each part of a continuous business process, and if the groups are working as a team efficiently, the lines are blurred in terms of where one group’s tasks end and the other’s begin. That’s the ideal world. But in a lot of companies, territorial conflicts arise, communications break down, and finger pointing begins. In other words, we have sales VERSUS marketing.

Okay, what is the difference?
Most marketing textbooks define marketing as a large collection of tasks and responsibilities: from market research to determine customer needs, to analysis of market size and trends, to formulation of strategy, to development of messages, to crafting promotional campaigns and creating marketing materials. The sales function is usually defined as merely one of the distribution channels to get the product to the target customer. Whew, sounds like the sales people are real slackers by comparison, huh? But the reality is, even though sales people have a shorter job description, they are responsible for bringing in the revenue, and that is the most important objective in the entire marketing and sales cycle. Sales people have the most current, direct, and powerful interface with your customer, and without your customers, you don’t have a business. Remember that the customer is the key individual in this whole process and they have the money!

The sales function is not easy. It takes time to turn long-shot cold calls or customer leads into revenue-producing customer relationships. Sales people must be excellent communicators, negotiators, and have the commitment to deliver what is promised – and keep the customer happy and smiling throughout the process. It’s marketing’s job to make the sales people successful, giving them the key information, sales materials and support they need when they need it.

Which comes first, sales or marketing?
Bottom line is, sales people can’t be very effective without the information that is gathered and assembled by marketers, so I think that marketing has to do a lot of their work first. However, marketers can’t really develop the complete promotional campaign without input from the sales people who are the only people that interface directly with customers on a regular basis. Sales people will know better than anyone else what the customer needs, wants and thinks about, and they are in the best position to judge what may or may not work when it comes to getting key messages heard and understood by the customer. According to Sergio Zyman, author of “The End of Marketing As We Know It”, “Marketing is about systematically and thoughtfully coming up with plans and taking actions that get more people to buy more of your product more often so the company makes more money.” And those plans and actions need to include and involve the sales force.

Why can’t they just get along?
I have observed many territorial disputes between marketing and sales organizations. It can be pretty ugly. Usually, the marketing people feel unappreciated because they go to great lengths to produce perfect sales collateral, which the sales force either does not use or wants to change. The sales people claim that they never find out about new products or don’t receive the marketing materials until the last minute from the marketing department, putting them in crunch mode. In a recent survey by Sales and Marketing Management (a trade journal), sales professionals were asked how well their sales and marketing teams worked together. 60% said “Pretty Well”; 26% said “Very Well”; 13% said “Pretty Poorly”, and 1% said their teams didn’t even know each other’s names! I think there’s some room for improvement. One of the reasons for this trend: most sales people are “in the field”, which means that they are not physically located within the company’s corporate offices where the marketing department is. That leaves few opportunities for routine communications, unless one group or the other initiates contact via email or phone. However, the requirements for successful teamwork apply: it works when there is frequent and honest communication, an understanding of each person’s role, and commitment to a common goal.

Roles during the new product cycle
The sooner that you can get your marketing and sales people working together, the better. I always recommend that sales people participate in the new product idea selection process, which is the very first step of the new product cycle. Sales people can provide a unique perspective on the marketplace as well as how the customer base might react to the new product idea. Then the sales people will have more time to build the customer relationship. During the idea stage, the marketing people are sizing up the market, characterizing the customer and figuring out the best strategy and positioning versus the competition. That’s when the marketing people need to work together with the sales people to jointly develop a marketing campaign that will resonate with potential customers. Then when the marketing campaign is rolled out during the launch phase, everyone will be on the same page. The sales people close the deals, and revenue rolls right in the door.

Teaming up
If sales people can regularly communicate with the marketing group as new products continue through the cycle, then the end result will be a product that creates pull into the marketplace. The needs of the customer will match the value provided by the product. The customers will be more aware of the product, they will hear the messages and the salesperson can more quickly close the deal. Everyone wins. An interesting exercise is to have marketing people go out on sales calls with the sales people. It gives the marketer an appreciation of the sales process and some exposure to the customer, resulting in a better understanding of the process. Similarly, sales people should participate actively in marketing planning and strategy sessions to bring the customer’s perspective into the discussions.

Quick and Quirky Example
You are a consultant who’s been retained to help the sales and marketing organizations with a major launch of ECOM’s new product: an e-commerce supplier portal called “Constellation”. The company’s prior products were customer relationship management systems, so Constellation represents the first foray into supplier-side e-commerce software.

You first meet with the Marketing Director to find out what’s been done so far. Apparently, the launch plan is already in place, and the company is launching in two months. The launch date was moved up sooner because of a major competitor’s launch that might overshadow Constellation. The launch campaign will consist of a short press tour, a company website announcement, and a possible demo at an upcoming trade show. The sales force hasn’t been trained yet because the outline of the basic collateral is not yet finalized; they are waiting for more information from the Product Manager on technical performance.

Since this is already sounding like a train wreck about to happen, you decide to meet with the Product Manager next. She looks very nervous, with half-empty coffee cups all over her desk. She explains that Constellation was first put into place for ECOM’s own suppliers, as a test case, but also to replace an outdated company procurement system. Over the last six months, several of ECOM’s suppliers were not paid due to problems with the portal, and two of the suppliers contacted collection agencies and one has threatened a lawsuit. The Product Manager said that the suppliers were referring to the system as “The Black Hole”, instead of “Constellation”. In addition, the basic “Help” button on the portal only works inside the firewall and does not work outside the firewall (and, of course, most suppliers are outside the firewall!) So, the problems are somewhat fixed now from a technical standpoint, except for the “Help” button, which is good news. The bad news is that ECOM was hoping to get some customer success stories or endorsements to use during the launch campaign, which obviously will not happen with such irate suppliers.

Your last meeting is with the Director of Sales. He knows a little bit about Constellation because it was in the annual strategic plan for the company, but thought that it was going go be launched six months from now, not two months from now. Apparently, nobody told him about the moved-up launch date. You ask him if he’s aware of the internal test case of Constellation and the technical issues. He knew there were some technical issues, but had no idea that things had gone so badly. He says, “And now we’re supposed to sell this to our best customers? We had a four-month sales cycle just to sell our first CRM product, and we had glowing endorsements for that; we even won an award for the design. Constellation is such a different product, and now with these technical issues, we’re going to have to do damage control or wait until things are fixed and maybe find a beta customer. There’s just no way. I knew I should have stayed in bed today!”

At this point you have two options. Cancel the consulting engagement because it’s just hopeless; or, schedule a meeting with all the key decision-makers from marketing, development, product management and sales to implement damage control. Because you’re a very good consultant with an excellent reputation, you decide to hang in there and call the Big Meeting. It gets ugly and degenerates into much finger-pointing very quickly, but you get everyone back on track and recommend three key actions:

--Postpone the launch of Constellation for 8 months.
--Begin a new beta test of the FIXED Constellation system with two trustworthy customers.
--Have the sales and marketing organizations hold weekly meetings together in order to jointly produce a sales training plan, a new marketing campaign that uses the beta test results, and a new launch schedule.

And then you leave the room and send them your invoice (but NOT through the Constellation portal). Another company saved from a sales-versus-marketing meltdown!
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May your sales and marketing people coexist in peace and harmony and generate much revenue!

Catherine Kitcho
The Launch Doctor