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A Chinese puzzle: the battle between sales and marketing
| Guest post by: Drayton Bird |
Article Overview: Sales and marketing should be working together – but all too often they don’t. The author explains why – and suggests a training solution
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Free Download - A Chinese puzzle: the battle between sales and marketing By Drayton Bird |
A Chinese puzzle: the battle between sales and marketing
Who has the money? And who has the problem? And how can you solve it?
I was in Shanghai doing a few seminars a while ago.
It's a dizzying place. Every time I looked out of my hotel window the building they were putting up had gained another storey in the night, because people were working 24 hours a day.
Ambitions there are limitless - but not many people understand marketing well.
However they are by no means stupid - I would say (and results in many universities tend to confirm this) they are smarter than most Westerners, and ask highly relevant questions.
One man asked me to explain the relationship between sales and marketing. This made me think about a problem we come up against time and again.
As Thomas Watson Jnr of IBM put it, "Nothing happens in business until something gets sold."
Many of the people we work with who are in sales appreciate that unless they have a full pipeline of leads the business is in trouble.
More to the point, they are in trouble - because they're judged by sales results.
And why are they in trouble?
Very often because although they have to produce the results, they don't have the money- the marketing budget. The marketing director has that. And he or she is often more concerned with things like branding and advertising. Lamentable, really.
Results: impasse - and very often bad blood between sales and marketing.
What's the answer?
Collaboration. In far too many firms, sales and marketing - who should be natural partners - are sworn enemies. The sales people see the marketing folk as a bunch of high-falutin' theorists who know nothing about the real world. The marketers regard the sales people as a bunch of unsophisticated oafs. Yet the truth is - as you would know if you ever had to take money off people face to face, that selling is damn hard work.
Get them to talk to each other.
Get them to explain each other's problems.
Then get each side to come up with solutions - for the other guy's problems.
A session which involved doing this would achieve a lot more than some of the stuff that passes for training in business.
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Article Tags: ambitions, bad blood, branding and advertising, collaboration, enemies, hotel window, impasse, jnr, marketers, marketing budget, natural partners, nbsp, pipeline, real world, relevant questions, seminars, shanghai, theorists, thomas watson, westerners
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