Sales is from Mars. Marketing is from Venus.
If you’ve ever experienced friction between members of a sales team and a marketing team, it can get ugly! More importantly, it can hamper success for a lengthy period of time. That’s because sales and marketing teams for B2B companies often work independently of each other and do not typically share KPIs and metrics for success. This is not how it should be.
Both functions (sales and marketing) speak different languages that have different meanings to the bottom line and they never seem to be integrated into each other. The result is both sides having a different measure of success and the sales team ultimately taking way too much responsibility for the revenue growth of the company. Sales burnout is a real thing. (We talk about this over functioning in Sales vs ABM and how it hampers revenue acceleration.)
Here’s how the two functions typically (ineffeciently) operate across many companies whether B2B or B2C:
Marketing is responsible for driving the soft metrics (e.g. awareness, engagement, brand). Marketing DOES NOT directly impact sales/revenue growth – that is the role of the sales team. If you build a brand, sales will come. (Isn’t that the good old adage for everything – build it and they will come?)
These dynamics are some of the reasons why there’s often friction between sales and marketing teams. Sales doesn’t always see the true value that the marketing team brings to the table, and marketing doesn’t always see its role in driving tangible growth. Hence, the different languages that they speak.
In 2021 and beyond, this practice is an epic fail of many organizations whose main goal is sustainable profit growth. This is the wrong perception of what marketing’s true role is to be. At Blueprint, we have a fundamental difference in our approach and definition of marketing’s role. We believe that marketing should fundamentally drive business impact and that it shares this responsibility with sales.
The good news is, there is a way to drive alignment and shared successes that closes deals and generates revenue more than you may realize. In an ideal scenario, there is top-down alignment between the marketing and sales teams, and that’s often reflective in the approach that the marketing team takes to connect all of its activities back to the same KPIs that the sales team is measured by.
This does not mean that marketing does not serve a function outside of sales support…it does (i.e. communications, PR, outreach, etc). However, what this approach means is that marketing’s main role should first be focused on driving revenue growth. If your marketing is only focused on communications impact and not business impact, then know that your marketing is more of a cost center and not a profit driver. Marketing should ultimately drive profits and not just awareness!
We do not leave it up to sales alone to drive growth. We also do not believe that marketing’s output should focus mainly on the soft metrics. Marketing should be measured by the business impact it creates, though this impact may look different than sales impact. Essentially, marketing should always be solving for something, but unfortunately, marketing typically just focuses on the soft and fluffy.
This is what top to bottom organizational alignment begins to look like for sales and marketing teams and how both can collaborate to accelerate revenue growth.
Blueprint helps companies do this through sales reengineering so that sales and marketing teams are both focused on accelerating growth and revenues.
There’s more in our knowledge bank about Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and how to reduce or eliminate the friction between Sales and Marketing for B2B companies.
