Digital Selling – The need for sales and marketing to work together

Dave Harries: Something that screams out from the book, I think, is this need for sales and marketing to work together. I wonder sometimes, why is it taking until now, before we’ve kind of appreciated that, that it’s a good idea that they work together.

Grant Leboff: Right, it’s a good question. I think it was always a good idea that they work together, but I think they got away with not working together. What would happen traditionally is marketing would do a lot of the brand communications. They would decide on the product placement, the positioning, the pricing, and those kind of things, then go out to the customers via brochures, and leaflets, and those kind of avenues and channels. Often, I think sales would criticize marketing for not generating enough awareness and good leads.

Meanwhile, the sales people would be bashing on doors, cold calling, doing what I call the interpersonal stuff, and there to convert. Marketing would be saying, “Well, sales doesn’t convert high enough, you know, we got great leads.” There was a tension between them all the time. Actually, marketing, I think, traditionally many organizations were seen as the people who spent the money, where of course sales, it was easy to measure our ROI. We paid 20,000 pounds a year, and we brought in 200,000 pounds worth of business. I think traditionally, sales were the more commercially minded, the board thought, and therefore, they were championed a bit more. Often marketing struggled to get on the board, and sales directors were more often on the board, because they were commercial end.

I think what’s happened today is the channels have merged, because what’s happened today is marketing aren’t doing brochures as much. They’re doing PDFs, and they’re doing websites, and they’re doing blogs, and they’re producing videos. Meanwhile, in the world of selling, it’s very simple, you have to be where your customers are, and where are your customers looking for your products and services? Well, they’re not going to exhibitions in the same way. They’re certainly not going around picking up brochures. They’re going online, they’re searching, they’re using forums, they’re doing these things, so sales people have to be there as well.

In a world where the channels are merging, that’s tremendous opportunities for sales and marketing to work really well together, marketing to support sales people and their channels and content, to be very cohesive and very tight. You can see how it can be an absolute disaster if they don’t work together, because if I go onto a sales person’s LinkedIn profile, then flip to the website, it’s completely in-congruent. Or, a customer gets contacted twice, once by marketing, once by sales, within 24 hours, you can see how there’s a recipe for real disaster if it doesn’t work well. They’ve got to work much better together, and I will say, sales and marketing shouldn’t be two departments anymore, it should be one. Maybe led by two different individuals, but working together, talking, communicating.

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