By Hank Stroll on January 22nd, 2010
Why is it Sales VERSUS Marketing?
One salesperson’s point of view
by Frank Reed – FrankThinking
This sales person admits that he takes marketing for granted and asks readers what they think sales SHOULD do.
In many B2B companies there seems to be a disconnect between sales and marketing when they should be working together not against each other.
Please comment on how sales and marketing could improve their relationship. (You could win an IPOD)
In many companies it is considered ok to have a Mk Director, a Sales Director and the CEO on top of them.
And this is the source of all problems…. The fact is that the CEO has many other tasks and departments to manage and he does not have time (and very often nor the knowledge or interest) to mediate sales-marketing issues.
The sales and mk depts have (or should have) many collaboration and information flows in order to work together well. If you take into account that most of the sales and mk people have big mouth, the path to disaster is already set if they don’t share common values, a common vision and if they don’t have procedures that establish clearly who is responsible for what.
So they need a boss on top of both departments (usually called Commercial Director) that his main job is to mediate sales-mk issues and put these proactive and sprungling people on the same agenda.
Of course, if the Commercial Director does not understand and does assume this mediator role the problems still persist, but that’s an HR topic.