Easing the Sales vs. Marketing Tension

Presenting to the board of directors, when I was VP of marketing at Calypto, I once mentioned how the product we were spec'ing was to be sold and how straightforward the value proposition and the sales process would be once it's developed and in the market (By the way, that product is now the biggest piece in Calypto's current revenue stream).  Right after my presentation, one of the more senior board members commented that once again there goes a marketer talking about how easy the sales process would be!

There is always tension between sales and marketing, but at that time I didn't realize what he was really saying.

I recently read a blog by Seth Godin which I'm paraphrasing: in a complex sales process (for example a B2B sales model) for every 10 people on the customer side, there are 8 that are there just to stall.  Their role is to keep vendors away from the main decision maker.  The remaining two persons include a nay-sayer whose job is to just say no if the offering is not to be purchased, and the actual decision maker who will give the final go-ahead.

A sales manager's job is to usher the sales process all the way from the first phone call, through the 8  stallers and the nay-sayer, to the decision maker and the close.  At the same time, a marketer's view of value proposition is most often only effective in working with the nay-sayer or the decision maker.  Valid or not, a sales manager always believes that she can come up with the value-proposition messaging on her own when she's ready to work with the nay-sayer and the decision maker.  What sales managers really need is help in dealing with the stallers - sales managers find it boring, time consuming, and it tends to be more detail oriented than they like it.  And as you can imagine most of the sales cycle is spent dealing with stallers.

What marketing managers fail to come up with proactively is tactics and campaigns to assist the sales managers with stallers and better yet speed up the process of dealing with them.  These tactics are after-thoughts and are mostly developed reactively as a response to customers stalling tactics.  The lack of these proactive measures to deal with stallers seeds the marketing vs. sales tension as sales views that as marketing's failure to deliver, while marketing's focus is on creating the feature/benefit and value-proposition collateral.  Furthermore, many marketing managers believe dealing with the stallers is really "sales' job", and hence sales' request for help in managing the stallers is viewed as sales' failure to deliver.

The comment made to me in the board meeting was a wake up call to re-evaluate my team's (marketing) role in the entire sales process and hence complete the entire roll-out strategy with tactics that cover stallers, in addition to the nay-sayers and decision makers.