If recognizing the problem is half the battle, I am
happy to report that we are clearly there.
No matter whom I asked, the response was loud, clear, and uniform: IT’S
A BIG PROBLEM.
After so much has been said and written about this
issue, how come we have so little to show for?
Are we looking for solutions in all the wrong places? Or could it
be that we are looking at an unsolvable problem?
Chris Maher is the Founder and President of
Fosforus, an agency focused on B-to-B
marketing. Chris is also a marketing
innovator that has worked with some of the most successful enterprise software
companies, including i2, SAP, and many smaller ones. In his poetic language, Chris attributes the
"toxic gulf" that separates sales from marketing in many
organizations to lack of respect on both sides: “Too often, there is not only
NO respect, but disrespect. Poor
marketers resent inputs from the sales team because they come from ‘tactical
monkeys.’ Poor sales executives resent
the efforts of marketers because they come from ‘ivory towers.’”
I have to warn you in advance that despite the fact
that I spoke with some of the smartest and most experienced people in the
enterprise software industry, this article will probably raise more questions
than provide answers.
Why pursue the issue, you may ask? Why not just let it continue the way it has
for most companies for many years? To
answer this, I will take a diversion from our focus on enterprise software and
look at an example from a different industry.
Those of you that are familiar with the Consumer Goods industry are
probably familiar with the facts, but others may not.
Consider this: an amount in the order of $100
Billion (yes, you’re reading it correctly) is wasted every year by consumer
goods manufacturers due to poor planning and execution of trade promotions,
i.e., incentives given by manufacturers to their retail channels. These days, this is a hot topic of
discussion within the consumer goods industry, partially due to regulatory
reporting changes that require manufacturers to deduct promotion costs from
their revenues. But for years, the
industry has just thrown billion after billion into this black hole called
trade promotions and nobody took notice.
Changing the practices that lead to such vast waste is not an easy
undertaking. It will take years to
implement, and even longer to bear results.
The lesson here is that certain industry practices
may be so deep rooted that most company executives feel too overwhelmed to take
them head on. At the same time, these
practices may be so costly, that changing them could really turn the fortunes
of a company. In the consumer goods
industry, the $100B figure represents 20% of the industry’s revenue. Do you have any idea how much the divide
between marketing and sales is costing your company? What if you could add 20% to your company’s top line by solving
this problem? (Read an excellent
article on this topic by Scott Santucci below).
My goal is to shake the boat a bit, and hopefully
get a constructive discussion to continue beyond the anecdotal. I am not hoping for silver bullets, but
maybe if we put our collective minds to it in a more focused manner, we can
come up with some ideas that will help us improve the state of the industry.
Is
there a reason to keep marketing and sales separate?
This was the first question I asked the people I
spoke with. More so, are the functional
responsibilities of the two organizations correctly defined?
Let’s look at a couple of the definitions commonly
used to distinguish the two functions:
- Marketing
is long-term, sales is short-time. With enterprise
software sales cycles ranging from 6-18 months and marketing cycles
shortening thanks to electronic distribution, is this still a valid
distinction?
- Marketing
addresses many prospects, sales is one to one.
As marketing becomes more personalized (one-to-one marketing), is it
still a good definition? Does marketing have no role in supporting
individual sales efforts?
Most of the software executives I spoke with believe
that marketing and sales should be kept separate. Moshe Ben-Bassat, CEO of
ClickSoftware,
puts the question in a broader perspective: “Management in general is a
spectrum of activities with handshakes up and down the organization as well as
horizontally between departments. It is
not only between marketing and sales; similar issues exist between sales
engineering and professional services in the transition from pre- to post-sales
activities, for example. The key is
clear definitions of who does what and a streamlined handshake process.”
Chris Maher points out the value of the different
perspectives each of the organizations bring to the table: “Sales is Indigeny. it brings the native
knowledge of the way things are really done.
Marketing is Exogeny, the "outside-in" view of the world. Marry the two and extraordinary innovations
and insights will happen.”
David Schapiro from ClickSoftware has been on both
sides of the divide. He too sees the
need for each of the functions to learn from each other: “In the enterprise software world, sales
people have to think strategically; at the same time, marketing has to help
sales by being more tactical. But if
you combine the two into one organization, the long-term will always be the one
sacrificed.”
Considering
that marketing oversees a broad area of responsibilities, it is easy to see why
most people I spoke with support the separation of marketing and sales. Dan Dolberger, Director of
Marketing at
Earnix explains: “While sales and marketing may find
themselves stepping on each other's toes with respect to lead generation, they
still have very different jobs to do in other aspects of the process.
Positioning, market definition, brand building, and competitive analysis should
be provided by the marketing function.”
Neta Wolf, who has served in both the marketing and
sales organizations at ClickSoftware, adds an interesting observation: “We have
been successful in places where we’ve been able to blur the boundaries between
the organizations, for example, when inside sales works closely with marketing
on lead generation. This may be an
indication that the two functions could actually reside within a single
organization.”
There is
no doubt that lead generation is one of the most loaded interaction points
between marketing and sales. Is
lead generation the responsibility of marketing, sales, or both? And since the latter is the case in most
companies, how should the two organizations work together to make the process
effective and avoid the customary finger-pointing?
This was the next set of questions I posed to my
interviewees. To my surprise, there was
a clear common thread and a good measure of practical advice in the answers I
received. Maybe there is hope for
fixing the problem after all?!
You can read all about it in Part 2 of this
article, which will be published in the April issue. And if you’d like to add
your opinion, please do not hesitate to
contact
me anytime.
