Marketing has a duty to provide sales with the strategic and programmatic support to execute great customer management. Marketing has flunked.
 Almost every major corporation experiences some disconnect between marketing and sales. Internal strategists talk about a "thick wall" between the marketing and sales functions that is hard to breach. They talk of cultural divides where "marketing is viewed as 'Good,' sales as 'Bad,'' which is a very dangerous development for internal cohesion and best use of resources. One head of sales in a technology company told us that the marketing department was despised by the sales team. The use of such strong, corrosive language is indicative of deep-seated problems.
Observant strategists also take note that the sales department typically does not have the imaginative programs to drive business and relationships at the customer level, in the way that marketing has developed them to drive business and relationships at the consumer level. The head of a global brands company once told us that the company's sales teams still go into the negotiations with customers armed with "not much more than a sharp pencil."
Why should this state of affairs exist? The sales department is as strategically important as the marketing department. It uses the same amount of resources, and often more -- especially if you count trade allowances, pricing adjustments and promotional funds. And management of the customer relationship is surely fundamental to any corporation's success.
The reason for the void lies in the marketing department. Marketing typically doesn't see service to the sales department as its responsibility. Marketing sees sales either (1) as an executing body, much in the way that the USPS executes the mail service -- passive deliverers of marketing's product; or (2) as some distant and remote group involved in activities totally unrelated to what marketing does.
This is hopelessly wrong. And because of this gap in their thinking, marketing departments have failed in their duty to provide sales with the right strategic tools and, in turn, failed themselves by missing the biggest opportunity to turn marketing strategies into business successes.
Marketing has failed in its duty to provide sales with the right strategic tools and, in turn, failed itself by missing the biggest opportunity to turn marketing strategies into business successes.
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Sales is just marketing by other means. The evolution of the great divide owes a lot to the misconception that the sales department and the marketing department are doing different things. They are not. In consumer businesses, where retailers own the interface with the consumer, the task of the marketing department and the sales department is the same: to get consumers to purchase.
Even the grace notes of this activity -- lead generation, positioning, communications, trial and repeat, loyalty and percentage of requirements -- are shared responsibilities. In-store presence, pricing, display and point-of-sale communications may be as important as advertising or consumer promotion.
In business-to-business, the sales department is the medium of communication -- reaching the target, generating the message, tailoring the offering, and feeding back customer findings. In this case, the marketing department needs to bond more closely with sales. Keeping a sales force "on message," when they are so distracted with pricing, product features, and deal negotiations, is a greater challenge than keeping your advertising on message.
The same insights apply. Ultimately, your product or service is utilized to fill a need. Understanding that need, and mapping the complex web of emotional and functional benefits that needs to be woven to meet the need, can occur only when there is genuine insight -- a unique piece of knowledge uniquely interpreted to create an advantage for your brand in the eyes and experience of the user.
In the consumer business, that insight is employed to position your brand with the consumer. But it should also be employed on behalf of the retail customer. Your insight about consumers in general is also an insight into shoppers in a particular store or chain. By sharing that insight (and possibly supplementing it with original consumer research with your customer's shopper base), you can help your customer as well as help your brand. Your customer might sell more of all the brands in the category (with an optimized assortment and presentation you help to develop) and your brand benefits most by being the thought leader in the eyes of the retailer.
In business to business, it's a similar process. If you have knowledge of your customer's markets, or your customer's customers, from which you can derive original insights, then you are in a position to build a better relationship and a better business by sharing the insights and helping the customer build their business, and therefore build yours.
The wall that divides the two departments must be broken down by marketing's commitment to develop the right strategic tools.
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In both instances, a marketing skill (deriving insights and processing them into actionable strategies and plans) is applied by both the marketing department and the sales department. The data for the insight may come from sales (e.g., special customer or market knowledge); the processing must be done by marketing, because this is their skill set; and the application to the customer's business may be executed by sales. It's a seamless process, best achieved via straight-line collaboration, unimpeded by turf wars or misunderstandings.
The same development processes should be implemented. The marketing department gathers these key insights and processes them into a strategy using complex tools. Analysis of the terrain of emotional and functional benefits identifies space that is unoccupied by competition. Analysis of the space (number of consumers, size of expenditures, intensity of need, etc.) identifies the economic opportunity. Product testing and communications development and testing reveals how to take the space. Creative programs and campaigns emerge from the test environment. All of these processes can be turned into powerful business tools available for all the marketing practitioners across the company and its divisions and geographies.
The sales department typically does not have these kinds of robust processes at its disposal. Its weapons tend to be more tactical -- such as presentation, pricing, and volume discounts. Strategic planners and sophisticated staff groups are not as available in sales as they are in marketing.
For these reasons, marketing holds the key to providing customers with strategic rather than tactical value, which is the secret to better relationships and better business. It is the job of the marketing department to develop the positioning, communication and business strategies to engage customers. It is also the job of the marketing department to translate these strategies into plans and programs that the sales department can deploy effectively, and to utilize the learnings from these deployments for continuous improvement.
Hunter Hastings is managing partner of EMM Consulting Group, which advises companies on how to implement Enterprise Marketing Management, a multi-faceted system for global brand management combining marketing knowledge, best practice processes and training with collaborative software, marketing tools and infrastructure. He can be reached at HunterHastings@EMMConsulting.net
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