Why do sales and marketing need to work together?

Grant Leboff: One of the big challenges, I think, in business to business organisations today is this kind of blurring of lines between sales and marketing. As more and more goes online, as marketing does more personal communications, as salespeople have to perhaps, communicate in social media and do other things. So in your experience, how do company start to try and align those functions?

Simon Hall: I think the key is actually, first of all, everyone has to accept that the buyer behaviour has changed. Buyers spend a lot more time online that ever before. They'll consume a lot more digital information, will engage in different ways, but there is also a point where they don't want to be contacted directly, like they used to be from a vendor. So this means two things. One, the marketing role has changed. The marketing role needs to step up and do a lot more in the early stages to inform and educate the customer.  On the flip side, the sales role has also changed. Sales need to think about how they actually can promote out content as well, but by sales, working with marketing or marketing supporting sales to actually give them the right content and the right timing to actually send out information through their network. Then also, when you think about customer spending more time on social than ever before, so existing customers of sales guys, they need to think about how they're using social to keep those customers up to date and in the network.

Grant Leboff: And what are the keys to getting this sort of alignment then in your opinion, because traditionally, marketing and sales were in different corridors in the organisation and threw things at each other, blaming 'they don't get me good leads', 'they didn't utilise the leads properly' and those kind of perennial splits.  So suddenly, culturally, to bring those two together and get them working well together, are there any key factors that you have seen in companies for them to achieve that?

Simon Hall: The advice I was given and the way we did it when I was working with sales was to set up a service level agreement with sales to say; 'this is how we're going to work together, this is our remit in what we're delivering, and this is how we're going to measure marketing' and agree that with sales. Then on the flip side, agree on what sales are going to do within that relationship, and that could be a relationship around leads and hunting of a leads, but it could also be a broader relationship that you set up within an SLA [Service Level Agreement].

Grant Leboff: And how easy was it to get that alignment? So in other words, it's OK we're going to have an SLA, but were views very aligned from day one, or actually do you have to bridge people together and what were the sticking points if you did?

Simon Hall: That's a good question. I think, a number of different journey points and it wasn't just an overnight thing to answer your question, it was more like a journey across maybe, half a year to a year to actually understand; are we targeting the right people? Are we doing too many things? Are we handing over too many leads at one point to sales? Then the other thing was actually when we hand over leads, for example, to sales, are they actually sales qualified leads to be able to give to sales? So there was a point on where marketing needed to own up and say 'this is what we need to do to change', but also on the sales side, follow ups which were absolutely horrendous, needed to improve. Sales needed to actually ensure that they followed up a lead within a reasonable amount of time.

Grant Leboff: And how does it work, in your opinion well, because one of the things that I've always thought about is, sales is always in the one to one personal communications, and marketing would normally be in the brand to audience communications. That was the split. Now of course, you've got marketing who may well be interacting almost on a one to one level because someone's Tweeted the organisation or because someone's posted something on a Facebook of the organisation and whatever else... Conversely, salespeople are having to get involved in social media and respond to customers through social media or prospects which, of course, then can affect marketing. When someone Googles an organisation and Facebook comes out with something the salesperson wrote. So within your service level agreements or outside of those, if it was done in a different way, have you found any ways in the organisations you've worked with where you can start to bridge that and have an understanding of how those roles work?

Simon Hall: If it's an existing customer that is account managed, the way I've always found that works best is that the account manager - if they want to do their job really well - they want to manage the communication to the customer. But they want to do with what I call, in an assisted digital way, which means that digital is not just emails or content, etc., isn't just sent without anybody, but it's actually being accompanied by an email after a phone call before or after. And the account manager manages the content they are sending to the customer, rather than the marketing department sending it out. So I think that's the important difference. I would still say that the relationship of 360 should stay with the account manager, unless they agree otherwise, and with new customers then fine, marketing's role is to actually 'how do you hook new customers in and bring them over to sales'.