When Your Sales and Marketing Teams Have Friction
Many new entrepreneurs are unclear what to do when sales and marketing - inevitably - start not to get along. You can set your watch that this difficulty is coming for you.
Here are a few issues I've seen:
Given the number of conversations they are having, sales teams often have a “gut feel” of what is going on - which types of people will respond, and which do not. Sales can often sniff out the early adopters to target and sign up early.
Marketing, on the other hand, can tell you the size of each segment and what must be true to make this a viable business.
What marketing should do, instead, is develop specific campaigns about this micro-segment to generate more "look-alikes" in the category of lowest-hanging fruit. No matter how few they are!
Sales thinks the content that Marketing generates is not very useful. But instead of partnering with Marketing, they lob darts from afar.
Marketing is trying to build content to a "persona" but often lacks the real-world experience that would allow the content to ring true to the reader.
What Sales should do, instead of fighting Marketing, is write down - in the prospect's language - what problems they hear on the phone. These transcripts provide raw materials for some of the best content the salesperson has ever seen. In fact, use real examples. Jeremy Horowitz shared that he’s worked with companies who “record the sales call using a tool like Gong and have the Marketing team listen to those calls.” This is a great practice, sharing pain points directly from prospective customers.
Another frequent cause for friction comes from Tom Hawkins, who says “Sales often needs some ‘quick wins now’ while Marketing often wants to paint the whole picture - which takes more time & effort. The old marketing saying rings true ‘Market to everyone and reach no one.’ An agile Marketing team will collaborate with Sales to unearth the segmented customer groups and value propositions for each. Campaigns work best for Sales when they are laser focused on solving pain points for the customer segment and speak their language.” Absolutely - these are great insights. I think mostly it feels to Marketing that using specific customer voices are not "scalable." However, I think buried in this unscalable approach is authenticity - it's what is lost when things get too generic.
