What Do Marketers Really Think About Salespeople?
We work hand in hand. But do we get on?
As a marketing communications professional, I’ve spent a lot of time interfacing with sales teams. Typically, alongside other marketing team members, they’re my closest colleagues.
Many marketers see their jobs as providing qualified leads for sales teams and I would agree that it’s certainly an integral part of the job function. As a marketing communications specialist I see the other as ensuring the integrity of the organization’s image and brand.
The majority of working relationships I’ve had with sales resources, I’m please to say, have been extremely positive.
Keeping marketing and sales resources in close sync is vital and if there’s one field I’ve had to educate about myself during the course of my time in self-employment — it would undoubtedly be sales.
There’s another reason why I think that “sales matters” too — besides the obvious one of keeping the entire organization afloat, including the marketing department.
Whatever company I’m marketing for, I find it impossible to convincingly communicate a product without the benefit of knowing how it’s currently being received in the market.
To get that kind of knowledge, you need to speak to customers — including the dissatisfied ones — and see how the product is being used in the field.
You can’t understand what’s unique about the solution you’re marketing if you’ve only really seen what it does in your own company’s presentations.
Expecting this not to be the case is an extremely common mistake among companies trying to cut corners on marketing (a short-sighted gambit commonly observed among early stage startups!). I think it’s essential that marketers make at least occasional forays to the field and speak with the end users of the product or service. Otherwise they have no reliable means to distinguish between their own Kool Aid and reality. And doing so is vital to market with integrity.
Between instances when those forays to the field happen, frontline customer-facing resources like field sales staff can serve as vital conduits for that kind of knowledge transfer. Marketers, in turn, can make sure that they develop the kind of brand awareness that makes the job of salespeople so much easier.
They can also develop an inbound marketing pipeline that shifts some of the responsibility of lead generation off sales’s shoulders. Working together, sales and marketing can drive revenue growth and get a lot achieved.
But what do sales and marketing really think of one another?
Here’s my experience from the marketing side of the departmental dividing line.
What I Think Salespeople Think About Marketers
When sales and marketing do work in close alignment, there are times when the relationship can be placed under a little strain.
As a marketing communications professional — especially as one working in a non-English speaking country — part of my job is sometimes functioning as the company’s ‘language police’ making sure that everything that goes out the door is in relatively good shape.
If a sales presentation spells the company’s name wrong or deviates massively from the brand’s tone of voice — or worse again, contains misplaced apostrophes speaking about ‘KPI’s’ — then I see it as my job to make sure that those things get fixed in a timely fashion.
Naturally when you have to point out and fix the grammatical mistakes of your seniors, this doesn’t always feel good or comfortable. But in my experience it’s often part of the job. But it would be foolish to think that some degree of friction isn’t a possibility.
Many salespeople, I’ve noticed, have good marketing brains. Sometimes, I’ve had the feeling that the salespeople would rather be working on the marketing side of the divide and even hold a slight degree of resentment to us marketers.
This is sometimes the case where sales resources have been put in place before marketers have. If sales resources are being driven to engage in old school methodologies like cold calling disinterested “leads” then it’s little wonder that it will look like the marketing guys (and gals) have landed the better deal.
Sometimes — and sometimes as an outgrow of this — sales resources can be critical of the work of the marketing team or feel strongly that the messaging being used to communicate with customers isn’t effective.
Dealing with these occasional tug-of-wars can be challenging and sometimes differences need to be resolved at the managerial / VP level with an intermediate high-ranking executive as the ‘mediator’.
While I qualify all of the above by saying that I have mostly had good relationships with sales colleagues, there have also been times where I’ve felt that a colleague was attempting to undermine the work that I was doing for the company.
Sometimes, sales doesn’t really understand what marketing does — particularly when they’ve involved in doing a lot more than creating collateral to support their day to day work.
PR and thought leadership and brand positioning are all subtle activities but ones which can have enormous impacts on the company’s reputation and its ability to go to market, laying the foundational awareness that can make all the difference when a salesperson strikes up a conversation with a prospect at a trade show who’s already heard about the company.
Sometimes I feel like us marketers need to explain more clearly the value in much of what we do — even when it’s not always eager to quantify our efforts in ROI.
And Here’s What Marketers Think About Salespeople
If there’s one professional field that I have enormous respect for, it’s sales.
During the course of my time in self-employment, I often found myself remarking that most “freelancing” problems are really just sales problems in disguise.
Keep getting foisted with clients you end up hating?
Positioning could be part of it (a marketing concern) but your qualification process (a sales concern) might suck or be non-existent.
If you decide to speak to everybody who shows the slightest level of interest in your business, it’s virtually certain that you’ll end up wasting a substantial amount of time talking on the phone to tire-kickers.
While some salespeople might think that marketers are full of themselves, if anything, I think the jealousy is just as likely to run the other way. Salespeople carry quotas, sure, but they generally earn more than marketers too.
Sales and marketing can and should work in close alignment in order to deliver maximum value for the company.
Both teams have unique strengths and — by sharing more about what they do — the two can work together in close alignment. The result: happier colleagues, more revenue for the company, and a more satisfying working relationship for all.
