The sales and marketing departments are two extremely related departments and greatly influence each other at work. In theory, everyone knows that these two units need to sit down to openly discuss, cooperate and work together to be best for the company and customers. However, in reality, the working relationship between these two departments is often not smooth.

Although the job characteristics of the two departments are closely related, sales & marketing are still two separate departments with different functions and nature of work, thus leading to disagreements when the two units work together.

An example of a typical conflict situation between two parties is when sales didn’t hit expectations, the marketing department thinks that the plan is too good, but fails because the sales ability to execute the plan is weak.

The sales department, in turn, blamed the failure on marketing overvaluing the product. Sales also believe that the marketing department takes up too much budget while just using that budget to recruit more sales staff or increase commissions can achieve the sales target.

On the other hand, a common view of the sales world is that marketing is only sitting at the desk drawing plans, not being close to the market, or having direct contact with customers.

In contrast, in the eyes of marketing, sales are short-sighted. They only look at each customer’s specific case without paying attention to the overview of the market and foresight into the future. In short, both departments underestimate the other’s role in the company.

When sales & marketing work well together, the company will have a sustainable growth perspective with good indicators such as a shorter sales cycle, lower cost to market, and cost to sell. also lower. That scenario played out at IBM when they merged sales and marketing into one.

Before this merger, the two divisions above worked very sporadically. According to the executive-level description at IBM, then sales focused on satisfying a need, not creating a need. Meanwhile, marketing can’t show any correlation in terms of actual sales achieved after spending a huge amount of money on advertising. The obvious result is that sales will question the contribution of marketing to the business. In addition, due to a lack of coordination, when marketing prepares to launch a new product, sales are not prepared to devote resources to that. The activities of the two divisions go their separate ways.

Small companies often don’t have a dedicated marketing department. Marketing ideas often come from leadership, sales, or advertising agencies. Most of these companies equate marketing with sales, they don’t envision marketing as the broader way to position their company.

Some small companies will assign a marketing person to the role of supporting the sales department. This employee does product research to adjust to the size of the market, select markets & communication channels, find out the buying motivation of consumers…

In addition, they work with the agency for advertising campaigns and promotions and prepare sales documents for sales. Finally, as a multi-tasker, they also send sales emails, make phone calls or participate in trade fairs to create more customers for sales. At this time, the relationship between sales & marketing is still quite good because marketing is seen as an extension of sales.

However, as the company got bigger and the business became more complex, the leader realized that marketing was not only about doing the 4Ps well, but the company also needed people who were able to segment the market, position, and Identify target customers.

Once a company hires marketers with these competencies, marketing becomes an independent department within the company. That also means they start competing for the budget with sales. At this point, there began to be ambiguous affairs between the two parties each believing that it was supposed to be the other’s business.

Once done with high-level tasks such as market segmentation, marketing begins to work with leaders in other departments such as strategic planning, product development, finance, etc. On the other hand, the company starts to work. Think about focusing on branding instead of product development, which makes brand management a powerful position within the company.

No longer a humble team under the sales department, marketing has become an organization with the ambition of making marketing a core department, leading the development of the company.

Of course, other departments in the company, including the sales department, have doubts about whether the marketing department has the capacity, experience & knowledge to lead the organization.

Today, many corporations have made marketing leadership a strategic position at the corporate level rather than being scattered among the smaller business units below. Even so, when the economy is in a recession, marketing is often the part that is often cut first.

In economic terms, the most prominent contradiction between the two divisions is the budget division. Marketing with pressure on profit goals often forces sales to try to sell the position and brand value of the product instead of just selling for the price.

Sales always expect lower prices because it will make it easier for them to sell or negotiate prices with customers. As a result, there are two areas of frequent controversy surrounding product pricing. Although the marketer is the one who sets the suggested retail price, it is the salesperson who determines the actual transaction price. When there is a request for a lower price than the marketing proposal, the marketing will not know because the head of sales will go directly to the CFO. This makes marketing no fun.

In addition, while marketing needs to spend budget to create product awareness, create love, exchange about products & desire to use products, sales feel that advertising is a waste of money. Sales struggled to use that money to expand the size and quality of the sales department, which they thought would be more effective.

In addition, when marketing launches a new product, sales always complain that it does not have this or that feature as consumers expect. That’s because sales look at the needs of each specific consumer while marketing wants to meet the general, broader needs of the general consumer.

The budget division also shows the power and influence of the department in the organization. CEOs tend to prioritize sales budgets. One CEO stated: “Why should I spend more on marketing when if I want to get better results I just need to hire more salespeople?”. Sales department contributions are often thought of as real, and easier to measure than marketing.

Not only economic competition, but cultural differences between the two divisions also make the conflict more severe.

2 departments with 2 different functions require people with different personalities: one is inclined towards data analysis, strategic thinking, project focus & long-term future while the other is more about real combat, customer relations, focusing on business metrics, and aiming for specific goals right in front of you.

Understanding the characteristics, goals, and operation of each department will help not only the CEO to organize sales & marketing coordination more smoothly, but also help each department have a more sympathetic view and support each other.

Source: HBR

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