Focus eJournal speaks with Matt Highsmith, President, TailoredMail, to discuss ideas on how Sales and Marketing can work together. Matt has led large Marketing organizations at Procter and Gamble, Apple Computer and Attachmate.

Why Can't We Just Get Along?

Today, this dilemma and culture affect almost every company and often spell disaster. Easy to say, get along.  Hard to get each to work together, and view each other as an asset -- not a liability.

How to start?  Take a deep breath and think -- marketing must change. Yep, that's right. Marketing must build harmony because of one primary rule of business: Sales will never change because of the heavy weight that hangs over every sales organization. Revenue goals must be met -- or staff are gone (they either leave or are asked to leave).

It's not all bleak, however. This series will identify four key strategies that marketing can use to produce a powerful new relationship.

1. Focus on education

2. Get on the same page

3. Empower your sales organization

4. Design the right marketing team

Wait just a minute -- better understand the players first!

Before we get ahead of ourselves, it's important to understand the issues each party brings to the conflict. The antagonism between sales and marketing is legendary. As with most antagonistic relationships (Caesar and Brutus, Grant and Lee, Sherlock Holmes and Moriarity), the rivalry starts when common goals are blurred with different perspectives.

The goal of both sales and marketing is to increase revenue for their company. Yet their paths head in opposite directions when it comes to their core responsibilities. Marketing is responsible for generating leads by creating brands, honing messages and generating demand. Sales is responsible for converting those leads into paying customers.

Without marketing, no one would know about your products -- or why they need them. Without sales, the one-to-one business relationship doesn't get the nurturing it needs to turn interest into a buying decision.

While their tactics couldn't be more different, the big picture is the same. The two groups must work together to keep those sales graphs moving up. So what gets in their way?

Three roadblocks

1. The first roadblock to bridging the gap between sales and marketing is performing proper lead management. A good marketing program results in scores of leads for sales to convert into prospects and eventually customers. What marketing often fails to do is follow up on its own success. Marketing departments sometimes don't qualify leads, which results in sales wading through piles of useless leads that waste their time because they're not the right target market for the company's products. This brings about a lack of accountability and closed-loop measurements. Over time, it can reduce the credibility of the marketing group as a useful lead generator.

2. The second challenge is educating and training the sales force. Many companies fail to build the necessary educational processes between sales and marketing. The product knowledge necessary to sell the product to interested leads doesn't get transferred from marketing to sales. The sales force lacks the knowledge necessary to build upon marketing's carefully crafted brand image.

3. Creating and distributing product materials for an internal audience is the third challenge. Marketing groups excel at creating messages in a variety of formats for external customers. It's how they build the buzz for a given product. However, many marketing departments fail to build that buzz internally so that salespeople can get excited -- and informed -- about selling the product.

Four steps to better harmony

In the next four issues, we'll detail each step with specific examples and tactics to help marketing win the support of their sales organization. With the roadblocks better understood, it is possible to get sales and marketing to work together and push past the barriers to maximize revenue generation. The following overview of four "big ideas" will help these two vital teams work in unison.

Focus on education
Marketing groups should spend time explaining their methodology and tactics to the sales force. They also should invest heavily in tools to empower the sales force with the knowledge to accurately convey the marketing messages. In return, the sales team needs to be involved in the design and scope of the education process. With this insight, sales teams can better articulate the vision of the product that marketing carefully constructed.

Get on the same page
Bringing the two teams together to review leads is a powerful method to ensure that marketing-generated leads are useful to sales. The two groups can discuss a scoring system and strategies for deciphering the handling of hot versus warm/cold leads.

Empower your sales organization
Marketing must create sales materials and marketing programs that speak specifically to the needs of the sales force. Quality leads, sales tools that help the sales process and programs that generate on-going buzz and credibility are critical. We'll explore these ideas in detail to give you tried-and-true approaches that secure the support of the sales organization.

Design the right marketing team
How you organize and staff your marketing department will have a significant impact on the success of working closely with your sales team. Companies often staff their marketing department with traditional marketing skill sets, whereas instead, they should look for people who fill specific needs to energize salespeople.

This series of articles will explore how these four cornerstones can reshape the relationship between sales and marketing into a business model that exceeds expectations. Next month's article provides practical strategies to build better education between the two vital functions.

Next: Focus on education.