With this title, you might be expecting me to blurt either Tom Cruise character Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee’s line “I want the truth!” or Jack Nicholson character Colonel Jessup’s “You Can’t Handle the Truth! …” from the movie A Few Good Men. Instead this is about couples’ therapy TRUTH and I’m hoping you don’t think of couples’ therapy like Ari Gold from the HBO Series Entourage. Everywhere you look it says sales and marketing should work together, yet I hear these comments and see these statistics which tells me they aren’t working together:
Sale’s viewpoint:
- People in Marketing have never carried a quota they are only measured on deliverables, no matter their revenue and profit capabilities, where 40-60% of my pay is based on what I accomplish this month/quarter.
- Gleanster Research says 50% of the leads passed to sales are qualified but not ready to buy.1
- Marketing people think the product, service or price sells itself.
Marketing’s viewpoint:
- Marketing Drives Sales.
- According to Sirius Decisions, 80% of prospects deemed “bad leads” by sales person go on to buy within 24 months.2
- Sales people don’t realize the research we’ve done to present the right messaging.
According to Forbes, 80% of the sales cycle is completed before the buyer contacts a company.3 The customer is only contacting a sales person to establish a relationship, test chemistry, and see if she can trust him. Customers rank relationships and trusts over product or price. So with this TRUTH here are five steps adapted from marriage therapist Michel Madden to improve the relationship between sales and marketing (yes I’ve been both a sales and a marketing manager).
- Find the courage together to discuss your situation and problems openly with a stranger. The joke about marriage therapists is their marriage is in shambles but all their clients are in happy marriages. It’s because a stranger can listen and look at things objectively and without malice.
- Discover if the issues are internal or external to the relationship. Maybe the problem is controllable by the leaders or it might have nothing to do with what each other are doing or not doing. The cause could be a circumstance where the finance is not properly funding the other group, the product/service is inferior, or the market is not accepting of the premise.
- What do you see in other companies that you like and what do you dislike within your organization? This lets you get honest with each other and give your opinions and provide a better understanding to your teammate of your dreams, passions, confusions, and pet peeves. This is a chance to merge ideas together. The best thing to do here is to not refute or stifle each other, instead make the pie bigger and use the Improvisational Comedy adage Yes, And!
- If it’s to improve, who will have to change more? Never do both have to change equally; usually one has more growing than the other. This should be identified not to say who is failing rather to set expectations correctly and be compassionate and understanding of the lengthy journey of one.
- Has anything from your past helped or hindered this process? This final part is to look and let go or hold on to the things, which matter most. For example smiling and dialing is a dead term because it’s not about the quantity of calls any more — it’s about the conversion rates and quality interactions.
The four words in order which makes these 5 steps are based on and all relationships work off of are –
- HONESTY (I mean rigorous honesty)
- TRUST (Your partner won’t be honest if he can’t trust you and if your partner is honest to you, then you should trust)
- PATIENCE (It will never be perfect and your partner will make mistakes, but in my 20 years of working, I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to do their best for the company)
- PERSISTENCE (Don’t Give Up, quitting is the only time you truly lose)
Look forward to seeing you at our next session.
1Measuring the Impact of Lead Nurturing on the Sales Pipeline December 2012
2Sirius Decisions B-to-B Marketing Trends, Metrics, Models and Functions
