By Heather C. Conover
Conover + Company Communications
Salespeople commonly complain that marketing departments don’t understand the sales function and point to the failure of marketing to give them the tools they need. As sales people see it, marketing typically gives them materials that may have worked for some other purpose, but not what they, the users, find helpful. As a result, sales often bypasses marketing, creating their own materials. Chances are that while these latter presentations might be more on the mark, they also result in organization inefficiencies, inconsistent messages, and a confusing corporate image. In the end, they will neither achieve the potential growth in sales, nor advance a company’s competitive edge.
Marketing communications’ role is to support the overall goals and objectives of an organization. For organizations that want to stay in business, increased sales is a primary goal. Hence, what separates sales and marketing is not a shared purpose, but rather a failure to communicate.
To enable marketing to support sales activities, a strategic planning session should be held yearly with sales and other key members of management. This meeting should include an articulation of the company goals and objectives, the potential customer, current customers, competitors, other stakeholders, the markets, and the messages for each of the target audiences. Next, marketing strategies and tactics can be developed with input from sales, as well as other divisions.
But, this is only a start. Marketing professionals should go on sales calls periodically to understand the realities facing sales. Marketing should also involve sales management and members of the sales force in defining materials for use in the field. A tracking system should be developed to determine which materials are being used most frequently, for what purpose, in what territories, etc. And, marketing and sales people need to find ways to regularly communicate whether by e-mail, one-on-one meetings, and/or by phone. All this input should go into the creation and constant re-creation of materials to reflect changing needs and to help sales people and the company succeed.
At the same time, sales needs to be realistic about what marketing communications can achieve. The best materials won’t make a sale, if there’s not a good product, if there’s no market for that product, or if it’s not competitively priced.
Fall 2001 -Volume 11, Number 4