Why you need to close the gap between sales and marketing.

So in our previous blog we touched on why marketing is important to sales. It sounded simple right? But, if that was the case, everyone would be doing it, and doing it successfully…..

Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen, too often there is a gap between sales and marketing and all of the real benefit falls down it. It is no secret: marketing and sales more often than not struggle to work together.

Marketing teams see themselves as lacking influence over the sale team and see the sales team as short sighted. Sales teams see themselves as indispensable and see the marketing team as out of touch with the real world of customers and revenue generation. We have all heard this before “marketing just do fluffy stuff all day, the leads they send through to me are worthless and not worth my time”, “sales are just order takers, they never follow up any of the leads we generate.”

They are like siblings arguing over lead qualification and following up, and at worst they can blame each other for their poor performance. This age old rivalry is known as the sales and marketing gap. It’s a gap which undermines the two most important departments in your business when it comes to stimulating demand, generating revenue and gaining competitive advantage.

The fact is, that your sales and marketing teams are two sides of the same coin. What each of them does directly impacts the success of the other but they are unable to see it. If you can’t get them to collaborate you may as well give up, now.

The reason for the gap is usually down to the difference in objectives, and the measurement of their success. Marketing is measured on the number of leads they generate and sales is measured on profit and/or revenue. The key fact underpinning all of this is that good sales leads equal profit and/or revenue, the issue is that the two teams don’t collaborate, which means that marketing go off and generate leads that aren’t appropriately qualified in the way that the sales team need them to be, so the sales team don’t follow them up. By the same token the sales team don’t tell marketing what a qualified lead needs to look like, so marketing are continually working in the dark.

Regardless of the difference in scope, the key to success really is to ensure that sales and marketing share common objectives and goals. This will close the gap between sales and marketing and the effect can be dramatic.