The rift between sales and marketing
“the company is best served by a leader that values both disciplines equally.”
Nowadays missed revenue targets are often blamed on poor sales and marketing alignment. And it’s probably true. The Account Based Marketing movement and other sales and marketing best practices promised to fix this. But even after re-architecture of the lead to revenue process, buyer journey mapping and countless hours of sales and marketing team workshops, have you noticed that Sales and Marketing still just don’t get along? Is this a natural tension to be embraced, or is it really hurting the business?
It’s hurting the business. If not now, then very soon.
In many companies, marketing can take a back seat or be non-existent and it all kinda works. But past a certain point you can’t run it that way. Once you have reached a certain size, adding more sales people and doubling down on outbound no longer works. Sales efficiencies plummet and the company’s growth stalls. The sales culture that drove the growth so well for so long, suddenly does not scale. You now need to communicate product differentiators and educate the market at scale to generate demand. That is typically where marketing needs to grow up fast and be tightly aligned with Product. The reverse is true for many marketing driven E-comm companies that now want to go after enterprise clients. Now you need really good sales capable of driving a one-to-one buyer’s journey. In either case Sales and Marketing bring different skill sets to the table. In either case, you need both and they have to work together and have a commonly held view of the truth. They rarely do however. They still disagree on the quality of the leads, the maturity of the pipeline, positioning, budgets…. you name it.
I think this stems from a pure lack of appreciation for what the other role has to offer and how hard both roles can be. Sales people can be defeated by the discipline of writing value propositions, likewise a marketer having to cold call even one day would make them run screaming from the room. When the respective leaders clash, it’s because each either over-values their own impact, or under values that of the other half.
CEOs often elect to deal with the rift by putting both groups under a single leader; usually a sales leader. It works for some, but the company is best served here by a leader that values both disciplines equally. This tone needs to be set from the top. In my view, the lack of a strong, commonly held understanding between the two groups is the CEOs fault. Consider carefully if the reporting lines for both sales and marketing should remain with the CEO.
