Its Time To End The War Between Sales & Marketing

Product designers understood long ago that they’d save money as well as time if they consulted with their colleagues in manufacturing rather than just throwing new designs over the wall. The two functions figured out it wasn’t enough to just coexist but if they could work together to create value for their organization and for their customers. One would think that marketing and sales teams, whose work is also interconnected, would have discovered something like this too. As a rule, though, they’re separate functions within an organization, and, when they do work together, they don’t always get along. When sales are disappointing, Marketing often blames the sales force for its poor execution of an otherwise brilliant rollout plan. The sales team, in turn, claims that Marketing team sets prices extremely high and uses too much of the budget, which instead should go toward hiring more salespeople or paying the sales reps higher commissions. More broadly, sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what’s really going on with customers. Marketing believes the sales force is short sighted—they are too focused on individual customer experiences, unaware of the bigger market, and blind to the future. In short, each group often undervalues the other’s contributions.

Unfortunately, this lack of alignment ends up hurting an organization’s performance. Time and again, during research and consulting assignments, it is seen both groups stumble (and the organization suffer) because they were not willing to work together. Conversely, there is no question that, when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see exponential improvement on all the important performance metrics: Sales cycles become shorter, market-entry costs reduce, and the cost of sales is lower.

It is clear that when sales and marketing teams work together, the advantages are too many.
Account based marketing is one such approach of the new marketing era wherein these two teams join hands work together for reaching the revenue goals of an organization. The boundaries between these two teams become blurred. Their relationship is redesigned to share structures, systems, and rewards. It’s a more strategic approach wherein the two teams together get involved in forward thinking tasks such as identifying new accounts. The two groups develop and implement shared metrics. Marketing’s role does not end at demand generation. They align with the sales team to generate leads which have much higher chance of closure. These amicable relations influence budgeting as well making it more flexible and less contentious. The joint effort reduces the sales cycle drastically.

In a nutshell, to survive amidst fierce competition account based marketing is the best approach to target large accounts. At KIA Biz, we help our clients with account based marketing. With highly targeted contact discovery efforts we identify the right stakeholders in large organizations, help in creating personalized messaging for them and then generate leads for them. For Contact discovery, lead generation and account based marketing, do write to us at info@kiabiz.com