from the Marketo London Roadshow
Check out this blog post from Ray Coppinger (Senior Online Marketing Manager, Marketo)
I was recently at Marketo's Marketing Nation London Roadshow. This was one of a series of events sharing case studies and best practice on Marketo and content.
I loved the idea of 'next practice' vs best practice - but also, as someone who comes from a B2C background, I was surprised (actually more shocked) when I heard that marketing isn't always well respected in B2B organisations; not routinely involved in strategy and not automatically with a seat on the board.
And what really, really surprised me was the problem of Sales and Marketing not working as a high-functioning team.
On 'consumer' brands I probably spent more time with Sales than with agencies, and the best results were always when we worked hand-in-glove, coordinating activity to optimise sales through customers to consumers.
Also, the fact that Sales were aggressive negotiators kept me on my toes and raised my game as a marketer! They were not a team that you wanted to bring bad news or a bad product to, and their feedback from customers always gave us additional competitor context .
Although there were areas where Sales wanted activity that Marketing could not provide, and vice versa, most of the time the sparring was productive.
I've hurt my brain trying to think about why alignment and joint working is harder between Sales and Marketing in B2B. So here's a personal view.
In B2C, Sales owns customer insights and knows customer relationships directly affect the consumer experience. Marketing understands what gets the consumer into the store. But to create a real impact, Marketing and Sales need to tie their activities together, matching up in-store and 'out of store' plans.
Both Sales and Marketing know they are bringing unique insight - if they don't work synergistically, results are poorer, so they feed back and forth to each other all the time. (Not always using polite or friendly language, but they clearly understand each other!) And Marketing knows that sometimes they have to help Sales by providing additional support with a tricky customer: if the product isn't listed, the consumer can't buy it.
In B2B, Sales and Marketing seem to see themselves as having distinctive roles: one turns prospects into leads: the other closes the deal. It works as a linear process, literally one handing the contact off to the other with no real feedback thereafter.
In reality they are both talking to the same person (i.e. the customer! ) just at different points in the buying process. There are different insights that Sales and Marketing should still be sharing with each other.
The problem seems to be that marketing and sales aren't speaking the same language.
This seems to be a Venus - Mars problem. But if marketing and sales put the customer at the heart of their discussions, see that customer as one whole person (not 'prospect' and 'lead') and use a common language of customer data, to jointly flesh out more accurate understanding of the customer, perhaps we can bring these two together?