B2B Lead Generation | Ditch the “And” in Sales and Marketing

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Everyone talks about the need to get sales and marketing on the same team. But what I like about this post is it is a personal case study of how it was done.

Carlos Hildago

Carlos Hidalgo of the Annuitas Group wrote a great article for the MarketingProfs blog on an important issue for B2B sellers - how to break down walls between sales and marketing.  We share part of the article below and invite you to click the link to read the actual tips on the original post.

3 Ways to Ditch the “And” in “Sales and Marketing”

In 2001, I became director of marketing for an enterprise software company.  My first day was the annual sales kick-off, where I was ready to go and excited to meet my sales counterparts.

In an early effort to begin aligning with sales, I decided to eat lunch with the Western Region sales team and its vice president. When I sat down and introduced myself, the vice president shook my hand and greeted me with these words: “Welcome to the company.  I’ll be honest. Marketing has never made a difference for me and my team, and I don’t expect much to change.”

With that I was put on notice. I had a very, very tough crowd!

Four years later, I attended my last sales meeting at that company. That same vice president stood up, told the story of the day we met, and then told the entire group that he was glad he was wrong.

How did this happen? How had we aligned my marketing team and with sales by the end of my tenure at that company? How was it that we were now working collaboratively? How did we find success when the beginning looked so daunting?

In short, we dropped the “and.”

Historically, marketing and sales have been kept separate, viewed as two separate departments. They are even measured on different goals. However, as the B2B buyer has changed dramatically, this separation of marketing and sales is proving less effective. In response, leading companies are dropping the “and” in sales and marketing. As one vice president I spoke with recently said, it is now “smarketing.”

In one of his latest blog posts Gerhard Gschwandtner of Selling Power Magazine says, “Organizations that want to win must find a way to get sales and marketing to speak with ONE voice. Ideally, sales and marketing leaders should be able to complete each other’s sentences.” The key words here are “win”, “must,” and “ONE.” It is no longer effective to have the two separated. After all, the objectives of both groups are engaging buyers, creating new customers, expanding current customers and ultimately creating more revenue. Why wouldn’t they be doing so together?

So how does a company make the jump and transform to a place where they lose the and? Here are a few quick tips:

To read the tips and the rest of the article, click here.

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