Sales is from Romulus, Marketing is from Vulcan
All of the work that marketing teams do and the selling tools that they create do not just serve your company’s end customers. In business-to-business—direct selling environments in particular—marketers need to treat the sales force as a unique “customer” community. Even though Sales and Marketing have shared goals and values—winning business and beating the competition—it often seems as if the two teams come from different planets. Marketers need to make a conscious effort to bridge the gap successfully. Here are some steps they can take.
Step One: Acknowledge the Differences
Most marketers I know envy the high salaries of their colleagues in Sales but still have no doubt in their minds that they would never want to do the job. Excellent sales people must be highly motivated and single-mindedly determined. They must be willing to persist in the face of sometimes constant rejection. They must have a singular focus on winning the deal at hand, and the minutiae are only important when they affect that deal.
On the other hand, excellent marketers must be highly motivated but broadly focused. They must be willing to persist in the face of competing priorities and limited resources. Even when they take a big picture view, the details are always important.
When marketers keep these differences in mind, they find it easier to build effective partnerships with their sales counterparts.
Step Two: Connect with the Heroes
As much as they listen to and respect their management team, success is the primary source of respect among sales people. There are always those “elite” reps who out-sell their peers, quarter after quarter. Getting these people on board with Marketing’s efforts goes a long way towards spanning the planetary gap.
For example, I have found that bringing some top sales people (both account managers and sales engineers) into my positioning and messaging work on new products serves several important purposes:
These people serve as an excellent sounding board for what customers think and how they view product differentiators
Bringing influential members of the sales organization into the process early generates positive word-of-mouth for future communication and training activities
Once these people have become part of the decision process, they’re more likely to want to help make the launch successful, for example by recruiting reference customers
I also make a point of using these people as sounding boards for smaller issues that come up.
These types of interactions can give your sales people, including Marketing’s harshest critics, a new appreciation for the marketing function. You might also want to enlist your “review team” to provide feedback on presentations and other sales tools as you create them.
Step Three: Respect Their Time
Good sales people want to be able to absorb just enough information to get the job done, and no more. The implications for marketers are simple: get to the point. If a meeting should take 20 minutes, schedule it for 20 minutes rather than an hour and stick to the promised agenda. Put the important points in a selling guide or competitive reference up front, and let readers know where to go for additional information. And before you create that immense sales presentation that covers every possible scenario, imagine yourself sitting in a hotel in Milan trying to download it using a slow broadband connection!
Step Four: Speak Their Language, From Their Point of View
Remember that most sales people don’t think like marketing people, and they shouldn’t have to speak our language to communicate with us. For example, when I review product positioning with key sales people, I don’t talk about key messages. Rather, I talk about concepts in the context of in recent deals; for example, “When you were competing with Fawlty Software at Acme Corporation, who were the real buyers and influencers? What differentiators were important to them? At the end of the day, why did they choose us? What did they like and dislike about our competition?” I then sort out their responses and translate to marketing-speak at a later time.
This point also applies to every sales person’s favorite nightmare: sitting in a 4-day long sales kickoff being PowerPointed to death. PowerPoint may seem like a necessary evil to the marketer whose boss has told her and her team to cover the same 50 things in her one-hour session. But it clashes with the necessary communications style and context of sales reps’ daily interactions. If a prospect asks them how their solution compares to Competitor X, they can’t pull up 10 PowerPoint slides. They need to have the appropriate points stored in their brain in such a way that they can articulate them verbally, from memory, and in a nice way.
Tips for avoiding The PowerPoint Death:
Plan in advance and know your material cold. Don’t use PowerPoint as a crutch for inadequate preparation.
Use demonstrations and stories. Even when demos are hard to see, they always trump slides in getting your information across with impact.
Make it interactive. Enlist members of your audience in the discussion – as participants and as co-presenters. Varying viewpoints will help the material stick.
Put it in backup. Use 10 slides and hand the other 40 out as backup. If the information is more relevant later on, the sales team will know where to find it.
One final recommendation on speaking their language: walk their walk and know when to pick up the phone. In today’s email-driven marketing organizations, people sometimes forget that a live conversation is often more effective than 20 emails. Good sales people understand the power of the personal touch and they appreciate it when their marketing counterparts do as well.
Sales and Marketing may come from different planets, but they can live together quite successfully on this one. It just takes some extra understanding and a strong dose of mutual respect.