This article is the second in a series of point-counterpoint articles that aim to reconcile an agency's idealistic view of business with the corporate insider's pragmatic point of view. (The first article was "Point/Counterpoint: Two Seconds to Relevance.") Two of the authors of this debate work for Ciena. Bill Koss is vice-president of global alliance partners, and Bill Rozier is vice president of global marketing. Together, they have built a progressive marketing and sales system that seems to have eliminated much of the typical animosity between sales and marketing. In this article, we will discuss how that happened. But, first, Bill Babcock gives a little more background information.

Bill Babcock: Most companies we know of have a serious problem: Sales hates marketing, and marketing despises sales. Marketing is having great success generating leads and uncovering opportunity. But sales has no respect for what marketing accomplishes. They take leads grudgingly and when the leads turn into real opportunities they claim those opportunities were already on their radar.

There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between these teams—they have separate goals, separate cultures, and different fears and motivations.

Sales folks make quota or they are gone. They spend their day dealing with rejection and sweating their numbers. Marketing people never feel this constant pressure. When they skip in with a fistful of prospects and say, "I've just made your job easy—go sell to all these hot leads," the sales force wants to kill them.

On the other hand, sales has no detectable foresight. They undercut marketing even when they are getting leads that will make their quota next quarter or next year. Marketing initiates marketing conversations that turn to sales conversations, and when they do, sales gives them NO credit—no matter how overwhelming the accountability evidence might be. Sales cares only about what is happening this quarter and what marketing did for sales today. But marketing has to look further into the future.

We see our clients struggle to bring these teams together. I've always believed that it can be done, but it's a painful partnership. It's like the Brits and the Yanks teaming up in World War II. They didn't necessarily like each other and they didn't hang out together and sing Kumbaya, but they knew the competition was deadly and they were doomed if they didn't work together, so they got the job done. That seems like the best you can hope for.

Ciena looks to be an exception. From the outside, it seems that you and your teams have solved some of these problems. Is that true, or am I just seeing the public face?

Bill Koss (Sales): We certainly live in a different world than marketing—but it is a world with a common end game.

I think one of the reasons I get along so well with Rozier and his team is that I love leads. I believe in leads. I want a lead-generating machine.

I got my start in business in a Glengarry world of sales. My first real job was as a literature room, database, lead generation, inside sales guy. My boss was a crotchety old man called Mickey Ligor. Four-foot nothing, pinky rings, double-breasted suits, gold chains... he looked like a mafia don. He was like a very tough grandfather to me. So I was raised in an old school business tradition. If Mickey was around today and thought I was anti-lead, I would get a beating.

Still, the wrong kind of lead is a huge waste of time for our sales team, and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. That leads sales management to reject leads wholesale—I know many of my peers at other companies don't share my fondness for leads.

Bill Rozier (Marketing): I think we have the top-down aspect of our relationship well resolved. I agree that we have two very separate organizations focused on two very different goal lines, and it's true that both are wired the way they are because of the dynamics of the activities, but we understand the interdependencies—if we don't sell something today, we can't market for tomorrow.

At the same time, I also believe that we still don't get the credit we deserve in bringing product, application, and solution conversations to our customers. In fact, we're doing way better than that... we can get customers to "raise their hand" and to "want" to talk to a salesperson. The days of handing off "T-shirt grabbers" at tradeshows as a lead are over, and I'm not completely sure the sales team understands that change has taken place.

Despite all that, your perception that we have managed to declare a truce is basically correct. There's a cultural chasm between our two teams, but we've found plenty of ways to bridge it.

First and foremost, we take our field direction from sales. I think that's a huge change here. And for their part, sales helps us with some of the heavy lifting of field-marketing programs.

One important thing we've done is to set expectations appropriately. Our senior management understands that conflict is inevitable and expects us to manage it. It's perfectly fine if marketing and sales are not completely on the same page. But they need to bury the hatchet and make each other effective. It's also very important in my opinion that marketing understand what its primary goal is, which is to help sales in every way we can.

Bill Koss (Sales): Now you're talking—marketing needs to understand their role. I understand the need to brand and the value of a prospect already knowing who we are when we make a sales connection to them.

I actually think leads are absolutely critical. We have a defined set of customers but that does not mean we know all the people in an account that influence a decisions. Leads, brand awareness, and solution awareness are critical. Post the tech-bubble crash in 2001, decisions have gone up the leadership ladder. If our brand and values are not visible to top executives, we are at a decided disadvantage. This is where marketing can be of enormous value.

Bill Babcock: You two agree on the functional purposes of both of your teams and how they engage. That's the critical element of gaining a productive truce. When organizations try to reconcile the chasm between sales and marketing, they often focus on getting the teams to know each other, assuming that they'll be able to work together better if they "like" each other.

The residual tension that Bill Rozier mentioned comes from the timeframe difference of sales and marketing.

It's rational for sales to believe that their existing relationships are far more important than leads. Those relationships enable your salespeople to close business, but they don't enable them to find every opportunity, and certainly not to influence the long-term thinking of prospects or plant seeds that someday develop into opportunity. You'd need an immense and unaffordable sales force to do that. And you'd have to believe that the purchase decision makers with whom your sales force has relationships understand your product line completely, know every opportunity that could suit you at their company, and would always call you and not your competition. I'm sure neither of you believes that.

You don't really need to relieve that tension, but it's instructive to ask your best salesperson how many business locations his largest customer has and what kinds of opportunities exist at each. You can safely bet a fifth of single malt that they won't even be close.

It's not critical that they know that kind of detail, but they'll see the value of someone at your company knowing it. That knowledge wouldn't necessarily translate to sales success today, but used properly it's the key to market share in the future. By the time some of those opportunities show up on the sales radar, the battle may be over and lost. That's what marketing can do that the sales force can't—map the territory, ensure you gain market share, not just meet quotas.

I promise to limit war metaphors, but marketing can serve as intelligence (finding the opportunities) and artillery (contacting influencers and decision drivers) while sales is the infantry that takes the hill.

Bill Koss (Sales): Even though I agree with what you are saying, and I support that mission for marketing, it's almost irrelevant to me. I'm much more focused on what we need to take place today so that we can get something sold.

I think that is the chasm that marketing needs to overcome. Few sales leaders are long-term thinkers. It is the nature of the mission. Sales is the only team that bets a portion of income that it will be successful, and it is the only team that publishes weekly report cards on the progress that each individual is achieving toward that goal.

Bill Rozier (Marketing): From what Babcock is saying, that's just fine. We're already well along the road to understanding the value of each other's roles. When we present to a sales team we thank them sincerely for their efforts.

Great sales people make us better at marketing because they teach us how to carry on a dialog with customers that's more appropriate and actionable. What we need to do is continually get closer to the sales force. Create a strong bond between us. Work together. Focus on objectives we can both succeed at. I see the value in that and so do our senior executives.

What I'd like to get out of this conversation is how to move farther down that road. If you have ideas about how marketing and sales teams can get closer, you've got all of our attention.