It is a long established commonplace that marketers and salespeople do not get along and consider each other a mere burden on the company budget. It happens because usually sales and marketing teams are separate units that work on their tasks without consulting each other. Marketers devise strategies that salespeople are expected to implement, and salespeople have the feeling of what customers really like and do not like. Putting these teams together means that salespeople better grasp what marketers want to say about the product, and marketers can get the info about their potential customers firsthand. Yet there are a few biases and false beliefs that need to be debunked prior to attempting to reconcile marketers and sales guys. Here are the most outrageous ones.
- Sales or Marketing are open to anyone who just likes the job name. – No. It is OK to have proper education and some experience. What you also need is fierce passion for what you do, namely, for showing the best sides of the product to customers so that they came to appreciate it, too. This passion also requires the skill to understand the deepest motions of human souls and to match the offered products with these hidden needs of customers. The marketers and salespeople who can do that are real gods – but their power is a result of very hard technical and analytical work, not of some inspiration or miracle.
- Salespeople will give unrealistic promises and offers just to push the sales.- No. What salespeople really care about is building strong and long term relationships with customers. It means delivering offers that can be fulfilled and guaranteeing customer’s satisfaction. So a customer will become a loyal one and bring more customers that will follow the recommendation, i.e. client’s testimony. The long-term benefits of honest and achievable offers and promises to customers are really huge, and salespeople know it pretty well.
Marketers should explain what is the vision of promoting the product and what channels are involved, and salespeople should share their field data on what works and what does not and what customers actually want while deciding to purchase the product.
- Marketing team is just scattering the money all around without a definite purpose. – No. At least currently. Earlier the benchmarks of success of some marketing strategy were rather shaky and approximate, like surveys and call reports. Yet today the digital marketing is accompanied with plenty of analytical tools that can accurately show what channel yielded the largest number of customers and what channel can be skilled as inefficient. So today funds allocated to some definite marketing channel are not wasted but smartly invested and are sure to bring prospect customers right in the hands of a sales team. If a sales team can contribute to better understanding of marketing channels efficiency, it should be done as well.
- Selling anything to anyone right on the spot is a salesperson’s cup of tea. – No. No matter how brilliant a sales rep is, he or she needs to possess full range of available data on the product. It is the task of marketers to provide necessary info and instruct salespeople about the limits within which they can operate while persuading customers that they have come to the right place.
- Marketers are not responsible for sales numbers and they are not concerned about relationships with customers. – No, it is not like that. They are responsible, as if not so obviously as sales teams. So marketers will really appreciate if salesguys will tell them that prospects coming to a shop are not actually interested in buying. So the marketing strategy should use a bit different approach to engage customers better.
- Marketers know nothing about sales and sales teams do not care about marketing. – This is partially true, and this is the problem to be fixed. Like in the previous remark, both marketers and salespeople are in the same boat of selling the product to customers, so the closer they work, the better the results.
