Sales people need to spend some time writing copy, planning campaigns, buying advertising, examining traffic analytics and transactions to validate and evolve marketing strategy and winning sales tactics.
Marketing needs to spend quality time on the phone and facetime meetings so they can create better campaigns.
With the tools we have at our disposal today sales and marketing functions are easy to traverse. At a minimum, sales and marketing need to collaborate daily. Sales can help marketing with important feedback to refine marketing campaigns.
This is “the” intersection between sales and marketing and SFDC (Salesforce.com) is beefing up their analytics and reporting for this exact reason.
Customers will say revealing things to a sales rep that marketing needs to hear. “We found your product after conducting an exhaustive search online.” As a marketer, I cringe at this remark because we pay for Adwords and Adcenter keywords as well as syndicate content organically. As sales reps, we have to be able to ask a client the “how” question on the spot and drag that valuable intel back to the cave.
If we don’t infuse business intelligence and marketing into the process, we will continue to trudge along in highly annoying, inefficient, robotic hunt-fests and marketing cannot wait out an entire sales cycle to find out their marketing campaigns are off target.
Let’s not exclude programmers from this process. Most often, these folks get ill-defined requirements from the S&M (Sales & Marketing) crowd. Combining sales, marketing and development moxy are ideal convergence goals for any organization that needs to work in-sync.
Happy Hunting, Happy Farming!
Ralphy Jay
Sales & Marketing Aficionado
Lead Keyboard 