Sales, Meet Marketing
Marketing should develop a close working relationship with the sales organization. Yet the two are often combative. Professor Ben Shapiro of Harvard Business School, an international authority on sales management, said the biggest problem in business today "is that sales and marketing are in different fiefdoms. They don't even talk to each other."
I've had the privilege of working with three Triangle sales executives who have all gone on to start and run new businesses: Tom Hanlon at OpenSite, who is now a partner with A Shred Ahead; Scott England, vice president of business development at Zift Solutions; and Greg Burnell, who headed up sales at TogetherSoft and then founded 6th Sense Analytics. As the vice president of marketing, it was my priority to collaborate closely with my sales leader counterparts. I would sit in regularly on their sales meetings to understand their pain points and how marketing could best assist. A decade later, Tom and I can laugh about the "positive friction" we created between our two groups that actually helped drive our revenue targets. We were acquired by Siebel Systems, at the time the world's fastest-growing software company, two years after I joined. Siebel was looking for online auction software technology to add to their product mix, and our brand and customer equity outshone the competition.
At OpenSite, I asked each member of my marketing team to buddy up with a member of the sales team to really understand their prospect opportunities and challenges. While at The Learning Company, I traveled with our vice president of sales and his key account executives on corporate calls to share marketing programs that would help drive sales. Marketing should have a chance to walk in the shoes of the sales team. Offer to go on calls to help make the pitch.
So there you have it, the 12 steps to being a savvy entrepreneurial marketer. I look forward to hearing your success stories.
Comments