Bridging the Gap between Sales and Marketing

Marketing and sales are both activities aimed at increasing revenue. They are so closely intertwined that people often don’t realize the difference between the two. Indeed, in small organizations, the same people typically perform both sales and marketing tasks. Nevertheless, marketing is different from sales and as the organization grows, the roles and responsibilities become more specialized.For too long, there have been unfruitful turf wars between sales and marketing teams.

Sales Sells

The job of Sales is to sell specific products or services. Sales develops relationships with prospects. They knock down the doors, overcome objections, and negotiate prices and terms.The perspective of Sales is from inside the company out toward the customers and their horizon is focused on this week, this month and this quarter. If sales is not focused on the now, then there may not be any revenue this week, month or quarter.

Marketing Aligns

Marketing are typically responsible for awareness and lead creation. A key job of Marketing is to understand the marketplace from the perspective of the customer Marketing’s job is to direct the organization toward the segments, or groups of customers and channels the company can profitably compete. It should help the organization see how it needs to modify its product offerings, pricing and communication so that it meets the needs of the customers.Marketing also needs to convert the market understanding into tools and tactics to attract the market, build relationships, and develop leads.

The Missing Piece

All too often, there is no process in place to systematically and methodically identify, create mutual understanding, build and maintain relationships with the key decision makers (who are not buying today) in the addressable target market. Marketing consider this a task for Sales while Sales are focused on meeting targets and are not necessarily motivated, resourced or equipped to identify and maintain relationships with all the key decision makers in their market.

Adopting a ‘consultative selling’ technique positions you as a trusted advisor rather than just another vendor. The consultative approach, when properly executed, yields a quantity of information about the prospect’s wants and needs – which makes it easy for you to position your solution or service to meet those wants and needs.

Thoroughly qualifying prospects before setting up an appointment is critically important to a consultative approach. If you the salesperson don’t know ahead of time that your product will be a good fit for the prospect, you’ll end up wasting a long appointment drawing out the prospect only to discover at the end that you can’t provide what they need. For firms that sell their solutions and services into the complex financial markets, understanding the firms that represent 80% of the spend in their market and building relationships with the key decision makers within them is crucial for success and a key element in achieving an integrated Sales and Marketing function.

FinTech, asset servicers, fund administrators, prime brokers (to name a few) are increasingly recognizing this and redefining the division of labor by establishing a separate and specialist function responsible for identifying, understanding, building and maintaining relationships with the key decision makers in their target market. They are finding that this provides the environment for a fully integrated Sales and Marketing relationship and are reaping the rewards of lower cost of sale, fewer missed opportunities and increased revenue.