Sales and Marketing - A love hate relationship? Can it be fixed?

Sales and Marketing are two sides of the same coin. Both are paramount for the top and bottom line of any business. Marketing effectiveness will drive sales efficiency and in turn, sales effectiveness will build the business to pump in more money into marketing. Both the functions are intertwined (or should be if not in your organisation) at all levels - be it product, pricing and even placement.

Yet, the two functions across organisations do no see eye to eye. There is constant bickering and never ending process of blame game. Take for example a new product being launched. If the product fails in the market, sales blames that marketing did not do robust due diligence (there is a strong notion that marketing team is away from the business reality and it is only engaged in excel-sheet planning) on pricing or product features and hence the product has failed to pick up traction. On the other hand, if you speak to marketing, you will get other side of the story - "sales team would not have put enough effort on the new product and that is the reason it has not generated numbers"!!

Management is left at cross-roads at its own assumptions and conclusions as to why did the product fail? Was it sales, was it marketing? what was it?

We as business leaders grapple with this issue at all the times. The answer lies somewhere in an attempt to resolve conflict between these two functions who are engaged in brining the product to the end consumer. What could be some of the steps which can be taken to bridge this gap:

• Vertical and horizontal communication - there should be frequent meetings between the two functions at all levels (not just restricted to top level meetings between the two function heads) so that both can understand the challenges faced by the other team and try to appreciate the nuances
• Build credibility and trust through constant feedback and sharing sessions - Marketing team needs to compulsorily aligned to visit the market once or twice a month so that not only they get close to business but also win trust of sales team (and not just be perceived as an excel sheet team). Similarly if sales team has asked for some POS or POP which marketing team is not able to deliver due to constraints in resources, then sales team must not get into a bickering mode. It must have trust that enough effort has been or will be put by marketing team to get the required resources.
• Joint planning and strategizing - Any business forecasting or annual planning exercise needs to have inputs from both Sales and Marketing to ensure that there is buy in from both the teams about the products which are being conceived as well pricing at which they are going to come to the market.

It might take a while to develop, but this culture is very much required to bring maximum benefit to the business. And who else to drive the formation of a dream team than the leadership or management itself?