The Sales/Marketing Dance

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What's unique about Autodesk's approach is that it ensures that sales and marketing are working in unison to deliver outstanding customer value at each stage of the product life cycle. Marketing develops the market—qualifying prospects, educating, promoting—to a point at which sales can effectively communicate and engage with prospects, sans confusion or wasted cycles. And it works: By following this methodology, Autodesk's customers and prospects always get the right products at the right time.

Bulletproof Steps

Autodesk's continued success hinges on senior management's mandate that sales and marketing work together. If senior mangement at your company is courageous enough, your firm can experience similar success. These three bulletproof steps will get you started in the right direction:

1. Create a tight partnership between sales and marketing. The longstanding gulf between these two organizations can be bridged. All it takes is for marketing to have a formal "voice of sales" process to elicit intelligence from the sales channel. The kind of insight you'll glean is amazing: For instance, did you know that, according to Sirius Decisions, sales cycles are now 22% longer than they were three years ago, and 3.6 more decision makers are involved in closing a deal?

Capturing the voice of sales doesn't mean marketing launches a survey to discover whether sales would prefer e-mail or phone notices about new product announcements. Instead, it means conversations with sales to discover what's not working and how to fix it, and what's working so marketing can deliver more of the same. It also calls for marketing to avoid jumping to conclusions such as "sales never takes our advice." Instead, it requires marketing to say to sales: "Hey, we noticed you had a tough quarter. Let's talk about what went right, what went wrong, and how we can help."

2. Move from insight to action. Tying insight to action means marketing has to move beyond surveying sales to a true realignment. Sales and marketing proceed at different paces. Out of necessity, sales thinks quarter-to-quarter while marketing operates campaign-to-campaign.

It's often risky for companies to ask salespeople to change their mindsets, so marketers must change theirs. If you're a marketer and you want sales and marketing to jibe, stop creating marketing plans, product launches, and e-mail campaigns around calendered events or in separate silos. Instead, marry marketing process to sales methodology. In doing so, you'll be much better able to "operationalize" insight.

3. Introduce sales methodology to marketing strategy and adapt both to the customer buying cycle. The ticket to double-digit growth is to bridge the gap between sales and marketing—and then to align both groups around the customer's buying cycle.

Several years ago a large software company engaged Phelon Group to assess why there was such a large disconnect between marketing investment and revenue growth. Within a few weeks, the answer was clear: Marketing was so busy investing in "awareness" that it neglected to do anything to help move deals—and sales was overwhelmed with them—through the buying process. Recognizing the disconnect allowed marketers to more closely harmonize their efforts, which reduced their workload while increasing the marketing organization's value to the company.

Calming the bulls, ending the dance, and bridging the sales and marketing divide requires new thinking, It also takes time. But, as we've seen over and over again, the results are oh-so worth it. If the newly empowered buyer and increasingly competitive market hasn't yet created a sense of urgency for change within your company, then it is my hope that this article helps you move the issue a little closer to the top of your priority list.