|
Management 
*************** *************
Key Points Hiring the Right Salespeople Training for Results The Fundamentals of Organizing Your Sales Force to Maximize Results Introduction to Effective Compensation Packages The Basics of Sales Planning, Forecasting, and Expense Budgets
Non-Monetary
Performance
Management
|
How Can Sales and Marketing Work Closer Together
Even peaceful coexistence is not enough. The goal is to work
together to create value for their company and their customers. A
lack of alignment between sales and marketing hurts corporate
performance and wastes valuable resources. Sales and marketing
people must work together to create and fulfill demand.
For example, marketing people must monitor actual sales
against advertising dollars. What was spent? What was the return? As
another example, marketing must time new product/service
announcements to the sales people preparedness to sell them.
Marketing needs to identify target markets and
customers/prospects for salespeople along with collecting
information on these markets and the customers. This requires good
communication, a meaningful dialogue between the two functions. For
example, what are the competitive issues by which these customers
choose one vendor over another in this market? Which of these
competitive issues are real differentiators and which are table
stakes? Which of these competitive issues are your firm’s
competitive advantages? This requires the marketing person or
persons to review market research data and conduct customer and
sales person interviews.
Marketing must also work with sales to develop collateral
material or sales aids. They must work with sales on creating
demand, generating leads through advertising, promotion, direct
mail, telemarketing, and trade shows.
The relationship between sales and marketing can be improved
by:
1.
Marketing people riding with sales
people and making joint calls on target customers/prospects. This
allows marketing to be more involved with sales in defining and
executing sales strategies for specific major accounts.
2.
Including both sales and marketing
people on various marketing, advertising and new
product committees.
3.
Assigning a higher level executive
with responsibility for dispute resolution and conflict management
between sales and marketing. Conflicts may arise because marketing
sets prices and sales must sell that price. High level conflicts may
arise whether to allocate more dollars to advertising and promotion
or to recruiting more field sales people.
4.
Appointing a specific person in the
marketing department responsible for the efficient transfer of
information between sales and marketing. For example, marketing
needs market, customer, competitor, and product intelligence from
the field salespeople. The firm needs an efficient, consistent and
timely means for sales people to collect, share and transfer this
information to marketing.
5.
Using common metrics to measure both
sales and marketing success and then using these common metrics for
performance pay and performance evaluations. The metrics might
include revenue or gross margin growth, market share increase, new
accounts or closing ratios.
6.
Marketing and sales agreeing on the
steps in the sales and marketing funnels, the steps between customer
search and purchase and who is responsible for each step. This
develops a common language.
7.
Marketing representatives
participating in sales meetings.
8.
Marketing and sales working together
on each territory’s sales forecast and sales plans.
Marketing and sales duties often become confused because each
function takes on tasks it believes the other function should be
doing but isn’t. For example, salespeople start to do their own
market research because the marketing department is busy with
advertising or some other function. For example, marketing people
start to call directly on customers and prospects with new product
ideas because salespeople are busy trying to make quota. Not having
clearly defined roles can create confusion and waste. The question
is how to properly allocate tasks between sales and marketing.
In a small firm where people have good informal relationships
there is less of a need for clearly defined roles between sales and
marketing. In these situations marketing acts as a sales support
function. However, the roles need to be more clearly defined if
conflicts or disruption of tasks occurs or if certain tasks are
neglected.
The relationships between sales and marketing vary depending
on the type of customer and product/service. New systems and new
product sales, first time or one time sales, especially sales where
the product/service must be customized, require more marketing
involvement and therefore more clearly defined roles and processes
for marketing and sales. Existing systems sales, modified re-buys,
where the salesperson re-visits a customer every week or every month
generally require less marketing involvement. The same holds for
commodity sales.
Shorter product life cycles and/or longer sales cycles also require
more marketing involvement and clearly defined tasks and processes
between sales and marketing. However, even clearly defined tasks and
processes require some room for flexibility. In larger organizations
with more complex products and longer sales cycles, aligning and
integrating sales and marketing allows marketing to become more
deeply involved in helping to sell/manage key accounts.
Be realistic about the conflicts and disconnects between
sales and marketing. Try some of the ideas in this article to
eliminate the turf battles and better serve the customer.
Management Dimensions, Inc., 2011 all rights
|
|||||
