The Convergence of Sales and Marketing

I've been through a lot of sales training and usually within the first hour the subject of sales versus marketing is always a topic. Why do I bring this up? Because the friction between sales and marketing is such an obvious topic that the general failure of this relationship needs to be dealt with before sales people can deal with their own issues. The center of the controversy is the definition of what constitutes a sales lead. Marketing believes that a name, email and phone is a lead and sales doesn't believe that someone who signed up for a free iPod is a legitimate lead. Marketing has MBOs on lead counts and sales gets paid commissions for closed sales. So, what is the definition of a lead and who's right?

Ultimately, the value of leads can only be measured one way, how many converted to customers and in what timeframe? There are two timeframes that need to be measured, first how long were they owned by marketing and second, once accepted by sales as an opportunity, how long did the sales cycle last. Marketing needs to look at all lead generation as a two phase process, phase one is gathering large groups of people who initially respond to a marketing program and are captured into the internal marketing database and second, those people in the current re-marketing or lead nurturing process. There are a number of awesome tools that snap into existing CRMs that I will discuss later.

So, who should sales be talking to? Simply, those people from marketing who have raised their hand to buy. What?? Do people really volunteer to buy or enter a buying cycle? Ultimately, yes they do. Once a person or organization has determined the problem they want to solve, they want to find at least three vendors to flesh out a solution, go through a proof stage and, if their needs can be met and they believe they can solve their problem, make a purchase decision. The good news for us sales folks is that they need us during this process and expect us to participate.

Clearly this is an over-simplification of the buying process (great sales people don't sell they enable the buying process). It does delineate roles and reponsilibilities. So, now how do we measure marketing and sales? Hang in there for the answer when I write about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).