At our recent S&M Forum event it became clear to me that the reports of the death of the sales and marketing disconnect have been greatly exaggerated.  

Some of the sales people in attendance said that marketing departments can be ‘intellectually smug’. “They don’t ask what we need” claimed one salesman, “and they make it all far too hard to understand.” One of the main reasons marketing suffers from such a poor reputation in B2B was highlighted by a few more salespeople, who claimed “no-one knows what marketing does.”

Whilst the views from around the table highlighted that marketing now clearly understands it has to support and enable the sales team, in responding, some marketers said they feared they wouldn’t be able to “do their jobs” due to being mired in sales support - something highlighted by Kotler, Rackham & Krishnaswamy in their HBR report on getting sales and marketing working better together. There was also a feeling that sales was selling “the wrong thing.”

During this particular strong exchange of views, it struck me that the benefits of seeing business development as a single, end-to-end process worked on by both the sales and marketing teams will be invaluable this year.

In a December blog post, Paul Dunay says that “marketing is the department a company builds to interact with the market place and the customer base.” But in B2B, how often is this really the case? I can’t think of many companies where the marketing department is closer to the market than the sales team. And therein lies the rub I suspect.

It’s even more important in this environment to get both teams working together to identify profitable segments and clients, as McKinsey’s report, the downturn’s new rules for marketers identifies, as well as a new report by Peppers & Rogers. But too often marketing is generating leads that sales don’t want, can’t close, or both – because it’s simply too far from the coal face.

So how to work more closely, spend more wisely and deliver results?

After much debate, it was agreed that one of the best ways to solve the mismatch was in sales and marketing collaborating over the creation of the go-to-market strategy (GTM). By starting with the business’ strategic plan, and working as a single team to plan the GTM, the S&M Forum delegates believed that marketing could deliver strategic ends whilst supporting the sales process. Thus there was peace on earth – or at least peace in the business development process.

Advice for speakers and delegates alike to those attempting this: 

-Start small, but do start

-Get everyone responsible for BD in a room, declare a truce and thrash out a GTM plan, by customer if necessary. Our account-based marketing tool might be useful here

-Communicate and collaborate along the length of the business development process. Marketers, get out on sales calls with sales colleagues. Sales, take the time to review campaign materials and target lists

-Put in place joint measures and commit to them

-Don’t be tempted to hand over leads too soon, keep leads in the marketing pipeline until properly sales-ready and keep campaigning continuously to pick up all the potential in the market.

-Work hard at the lead handover process – not a spreadsheet or an email, but a phone call between sales and marketing to cover the background and agree next best steps

- Build, share and buy into a data platform. Use it for all decision-making

- Execute small, quickly and use what the market is telling you to further develop and broaden when confident. Use this checklist to make sure it’s all on track.