'Sales' and 'Marketing' V 'Marketing and Sales'

You’re on a beach with a friend — you go there a lot looking for treasure. One of you always brings a metal detector, and one of you always brings a shovel. Sometimes you find things, sometimes you don’t.

Whenever you find something valuable, your friend with the shovel says, ‘Look at this wonderful thing I found!’ and they don’t mention your metal detector. When you mainly find scrap metal, your friend gets impatient and annoyed, but you tell them to stop complaining — your metal detector found lots of places to dig, and it’s up to them to uncover the treasure.

It’s a working partnership that can find gold, but could find a lot more, and could have a much better time doing it. Much like a business’s sales and marketing departments, there are far more efficient ways they could work together.

Align the goal

If one person’s goal is making the metal detector bleep, and the other’s is digging up gold, then the two will have very different ideas of how successful the outing was.

If you incentivise the sales and the marketing departments in ways that aren’t complementary, they’re not going to pull in the same direction. They might have different roles, but the ultimate aim is the same — get more customers. They rely on each other for success, and that needs to be reflected in their remits and targets.

Unify the strategy

If the goals are aligned, it should be quite easy to align the strategies. The departments aren’t independent, so they shouldn’t operate independently. Each one has insight and information that the other could benefit from, and it can form an incredibly powerful feedback loop.

Sales get to speak directly to prospects, and that means they hear the market’s challenges, and how buyers express and feel about them. With that information, marketing can tailor their materials and their wording in a way that’s likely to resonate.

Marketing can tell sales what topics performed well with the target audience. So, as well as feeding them warm leads, they can help to craft call openers that will appeal to colder prospects and pitches that will impress in sales meetings.

Recognise both contributions

When the goals are aligned, and the strategies are unified, neither department should need any prompting to appreciate the other. When a salesperson closes a deal, they’ll celebrate the marketing work that got them the lead. Marketing will celebrate how skillfully the salesperson used the lead that they worked so hard to secure.

If your teams have that mutual respect, you’ll be filling your pipeline and closing deals much faster than the competitors who don’t have it.

I founded Nutcracker to do exactly that. I’ve spent a career in sales, I’ve been a sales and marketing director, and now I run a marketing agency. I’ve seen the results when the two departments work as one, we’ve made it happen for our clients, and I bet we can make it happen for yours.

Get in touch, we’ll have a chat and a coffee, and I’ll show you how to do it. It’s jenny.knighting@nutcrackeragency.com, or 0203 941 0305.