Aligning Sales and Marketing: The blame game

These leads aren't good. You can't close. It's a tale as old as time, the sales and marketing blame game. But who's right? Is anybody right?

In my years of experience on both sides of this conversation, there's rarely a winner. And we often find out that the blame is shifted because we don't recognize the early indicators of conflict. Many of these disjointed conversations can be avoided if we know what we're looking for, tension and friction.

Tension can suspend a bridge, but too much will cause it to collapse. When I say tension, I'm mostly talking about economic tension. This is often caused by splitting the greater budget into too buckets, sales or marketing.

The sales force becomes critical of the way marketing spends money on promotion and the way they set pricing. Marketing teams are under a lot of pressure to hit revenue numbers. Yes, believe it or not, salespeople, marketing has a revenue target on their backs, too. And most of their decisions on pricing are all in line with that pressure.

Salespeople are known for selling through the price, often putting a lot of pressure on the marketing team to lower prices to make it easier for them to close. This leaves marketing with the hard task of setting up promotional pricing when many of them have never set foot on the sales floor. 

Marketing leaders and teams could cut down on a lot of tension by simply sitting with and forming a relationship with their sales teams. Sales and marketing leaders should share the reasons why the budget is allocated the way it is and how each team navigates through their own economic tensions. Transparency helps put an end to the tension. Now to discuss friction. Enough friction can keep you warm, but too much can cause a fire. The source of friction between sales and marketing teams comes from culture.

Believe it or not, sales and marketing attract different types of people. Marketing professionals tend to be highly analytical, data-oriented and project-focused, aka judgy according to most salespeople. And sales professionals tend to be hyper-relational, talkative and somewhat sporadic, aka pushy according to most marketers. There are obviously exceptions to these generalizations, but for the most part, the conflicts come from an us verse them mentality. There's no wonder these two groups don't always get along. But if we can start to see when these known friction points start to arise, we can get ahead of them. For example, sales can be hyper-relational and only focus on the customer and not the product. It's like a horse with blinders on.

Marketing treats customers like a science experiment, often focused on proving a hypothesis rather than caring about the test subjects in question.

This is the friction that can start the fire. Now that you know the early signs, it's time to take action. The next time you find yourself in a moment of friction, try to see things from the other side's point of view. Understanding where people are coming from allows us to be more patient. Addressing the economic tensions and cultural frictions that tend to plague our sales and marketing teams is one of the first steps to getting your team aligned for growth.