Make collaboration a cornerstone

“Marketers are stupid” and “salespeople are lazy”. It’s a familiar tale, and Logan Wedgwood says it’s time to change the tune.

Stay with me a minute as you picture this scene.

A marketer throws the door open, storms into the shark pen, and yells “what happened to the lead we got you yesterday?”

The salesperson slides his feet off his desk, sits forward and whispers “it wasn’t warm enough…”

The marketer and salesperson eyeball each other across the room in silence. The tension builds, and suddenly the marketer leaps across the desk and tackles the salesperson to the floor, looking desperately for a phone cord to strangle him with – only phones don’t have cords anymore and nor do keyboards or mice.

Times have changed.

‘Us’ and ‘them’ doesn’t work anymore when it comes to sales and marketing.

While a human can still specialise and choose a career in marketing or sales, teams need empathy and an understanding of both in order to be successful.

No more silos

Sales and marketing can no longer be in separate silos (if that ever worked).

Marketing is an intellectual pursuit. It takes data, testing, iteration, workshops, studying, technology, as well as failure, to arrive at strategies and tactics that work.

It requires a deep understanding of a businesses position, market, customer and environment.

Sales, meanwhile, is a discipline. It is the hardest job in any company.

You have to consistently do all the right things, in volume. Every single day.

You have to get up, try again, and face rejection, failure and disappointment constantly.

A salesperson’s numbers are the most scrutinised in the company, and the stakes are high – everyone is judging your performance.

But if salespeople and marketers can work together to understand the entire customer journey – that’s from right at the start, even before the ‘awareness stage’, through to loyal repeat purchases – then both will have more empathy as to the effort each is expending and a shared understanding and appreciation for the true value of a real lead.

Leads are the lifeblood of a business

Leads give energy and victories to salespeople. They help marketers deliver with confidence in the boardroom meeting. They’re not merely a ‘nice to have’, or a ‘vanity measure’ either – they’re an indicator of future revenue.

Nurturing leads takes planned strategies from marketers, a smooth handover to sales, and structured sales processes to continue to deliver value that results in an eventual sale.

Collaboration the cornerstone

Now, more than ever, it is crucial that collaboration becomes the cornerstone of sales and marketing so that businesses can maximise the opportunities available in a contracting market.

Great marketers can become great salespeople and great salespeople can become great marketers. It’s time they start really working together.

Together you have a team capable of rewriting the scorecard. 

Logan Wedgwood is CEO of strategy execution advisory firm Advisory.Works. Visit www.advisory.works