The Sales/Marketing Dance

Phelon Group's Stout says it could be killing your company

by Paula Stout

Take a peek behind the sales and marketing curtain at some companies, and you would think you were seeing battling bulls in a fight to the death. Too often, sales and marketing organizations are working at cross purposes. And that disconnect creates tremendous barriers for companies seeking to make headway in a slumping market.

In many companies, sales is all about "pain." So reps follow the "selling an aspirin" approach because their experience tells them that it's easier to get budget dollars from prospects in pain. Marketing, on the other hand, is reading from a different manual. Marketers' experiences tell them that senior decision makers are looking to grow, not just to ease pain. So marketers take the "selling a vitamin" approach—they focus company messaging on how a solution drives performance, profits, and growth.

The result is not only a huge (and growing) gap between sales and marketing but also a gap between your company and its prospects, leaving customers unclear about your value proposition. Lack of clarity leads to confusion, which in turn leads to slow and stagnating sales. Sales blames marketing. Marketing points the finger at sales. And so the dance continues.

Out of Whack

The Phelon Group recently studied the purchasing patterns of companies across 16 industries to see what buying looks like from customers' eyes. We found that the sales process is often out of alignment with how customers want to buy and, compounding that, the marketing process is out of whack with both customers' buying behavior and the sales process. For instance, in our study, buyers said they identified potential vendors based on word of mouth or Internet searches. (Note: The least common ways to find a vendor were through cold calls and online/print ads.) But if you ask marketing organizations where they are putting their money, it is in online/print ads or in brochures for modern-day cold calling.

In fact, some prospects not only identify possible solutions before they talk to a vendor, they also solicit sales references from peers long before the vendor's sales team is involved. One vice-president for IT development who participated in the study told us: "For big-ticket items, we want to talk with references. But we want candid feedback. We want all the details. So we usually try to get around the formal reference process by going within an organization to an actual user." Not only did this buyer seek a reference before he engaged with the vendor, but he also did so outside of the vendor's formal process.

Once there's a better understanding of how customers buy, it's time for sales and marketing to stop butting heads and pointing fingers, to start learning to work together to address larger issues and help the bottom line.

Autodesk (ADSK), the world leader in 2D- and 3D-design software and a client of ours, is one company that did just that. "A key role for marketing is to manufacture opportunities [prospects] for sales to pursue and turn into customers, but that is only effective if both sales and marketing are working together to deliver the right products to the right customers, at the right time," says Ken Bado, executive vice-president for sales and service at Autodesk.

For Autodesk, that means sales and marketing must be in sync not only with each other but also with the customer's buying cycle. The two departments must also understand key pain points and the market's readiness to adopt new solutions. To turn this critical wish list into reality, Autodesk invested in a proprietary product management discipline called "Path to Volume," which is designed to move products smoothly from launch to ongoing sales, and thereby to deliver products that meet customers' expectations about features, usability, and quality.