The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Marketing Sales

Fixing the marketing-sales disconnect

By Alisha Lyndon | Chief executive officer

June 27, 2017 | 4 min read

As an organisation grows, collaboration between teams often falls by the wayside. The buccaneering, “all-for-one” startup spirit, where everyone pitches in to solve problems and grow the business, is soon replaced by a hardening of roles; silos spring up and department leaders guard their territory.

not a handshake

Nowhere in a business is this disconnect more apparent than between sales and marketing. The disconnect of sales does neither department any good. In fact, it is actively harmful to an organisation’s ability to thrive, grow accounts and win new business.

The sales team is focused on revenue through building relationships with their accounts and developing opportunities, while marketing concentrates on generating awareness and creating leads – often through a 'spray-and-pray' approach of saturating the widest audience with their messages. These contradictory approaches illustrates the gulf between these two vital arms of business, and shows how they are failing to effectively unite their wisdom and skill-sets to win new business or grow existing customers.

Today more than ever, sales needs marketing. While sales continues to drive an organisation’s growth strategy, it has little idea of how to bring specific messages into an account, build long-term campaigns, and hit prospects with emotional messages that resonate and lead to a sale.

What’s more, by failing to treat their accounts as customers, they end up pushing their products instead of taking the time to understand their customers’ ambitions and their pain points, and proposing a suitable solution – the sort of relationship that delivers long-term value.

To succeed today, businesses must break down the walls that separate sales and marketing, giving them same targets but ensuring that each department’s expertise complements the other’s. Organisations must aim to align the two departments behind the same goals, create transparency in measurement, and develop a closer connection to revenue.

Instead of the old marketing waterfall, marketers must focus less on leads and instead aim to craft strong relationships with large accounts. It’s a philosophical approach as much as it is a technical one; and when it’s done right, it’s known as account-based marketing (ABM).

With an ABM-focused approach, marketing provides the context for sales, based on in-depth research and a thorough understanding of each customer’s market, its current needs and, crucially, how the organisation can deliver value and impact for each customer context.

That’s exactly what Fujitsu achieved with its campaign aimed at co-creating solutions with the world’s biggest logistic company. Marketing created a single set of consistent messages that explored business benefits first, technology solutions second. Fujitsu’s sales department then used this model to grow the relationship from a supplier to a strategic relationship by developing wearable technology services for the company’s police uniform contract.

The strategic and tactical response created a spirit of co-creation between the two companies, moving the relationship from ‘Sell to’ to ‘Sell through’ and ‘Sell with’. During the year, Fujitsu converted the existing sales pipeline and grew sales opportunities with key stakeholders that brought in many millions of pounds worth of new UK and EMEA contracts, at an ROI of approximately 2,500%.

This shows how sales and marketing can work together in the long term interest, not just to shift units but to change and strengthen relationships. As salespeople begin to have these new conversations, they then feed back into marketing, making it an iterative process.

It’s time to break down the barriers between sales and marketing, and it’s up to marketers themselves to take the lead by communicating their capabilities to the sales department, and selling them a vision of what they can achieve if they work together.

Alisha Lyndon is the chief executive of Momentum ABM. She tweets @alishalyndon.

Marketing Sales

More from Marketing

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +