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No doubt everyone in an organization wants to maximize profits and minimize internal damage. Breaking things costs money, and teams in conflict with each other are a liability—both eat into profits. With today's customers demanding more, companies need to focus on the customers rather than putting out inside fires.

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Why can't sales and marketing get along?

I've heard many cat-dog types of stories about sales and marketing. Obviously, these two teams are important to an organization. Why can't sales and marketing see eye to eye, and how does an organization deal with oftentimes opposing views?

—Denny, analyst

MarketingProfs readers point out why this happens and urge us to recognize the differences between the two departments. Readers also give salient advice on how to help the two important teams work together. With these suggestions, organizations won't have to put out more fires and will see lots of green instead.

The Why: Recognize their differences

Several readers point out that the sales and marketing teams are different in terms of time and customer relationships. "Sales is short-term focused (making quarterly quota) and marketing is long-term focused. Sales meets customers daily and individually, whereas marketing may infrequently meet customers and often in groups, like focus groups," Guy Smith from Silicon Strategies Marketing says. The sales team's focus is outbound while marketing's focus is inbound, as it needs to gather intelligence about the customers.

Marketing aims to develop many campaigns over a longer period of time using a consistent, clear, and logical approach with a budget in mind. "Thus, marketing focuses on the overall success throughout a campaign and not just on the day-by-day results it can easily track," Tim Osmondson, vice-president of marketing and sales with SkyeMark Business Solutions, says.

Manuel Alvarez, Gerente de Inteligencia de Mercado, defines how the role of marketing differs from sales. He says that marketing is responsible for developing an emotional bond between your product and your company, which allows the purchase to be repeated. That bond makes it possible, even though other products in the market exist, for you to satisfy the needs of your clients and to have them prefer you. "However, marketing does not sell products directly. Marketing clears the barriers that make sales difficult and makes the work of sales easier. Marketing is responsible for creating long-term relationships with clients and prospects that allow the salespeople to sell more every day."

Bob Magnusson, director of marketing with Ironman Parts and Service, adds, "Sales and marketing rarely get along when marketing holds fast to the notion that they know the customer better than sales. Sales works hard to build the customer relationship and views marketing not as support, but as "Big Brother" patting them on the head and telling them to step aside."

Michael Bolduc believes the problem stems from the different skills, responsibilities and attitudes of these two teams:

Sales people need to be optimistic and open minded to maintain positive customer relationships. In addition, their commissions are often based on revenue targets instead of profit. As such, to most sales people, almost every opportunity is worth pursuing (I've never met a pessimistic salesperson). Marketing people, on the other hand, may have profit and loss responsibility or be in charge of the market strategy to profitably grow the business. They need to decide where and how to focus resources in order to make the biggest impact on the business (get the biggest bang for the buck). The attitudes and personalities required for these different roles usually keep the typical sales and marketing groups at odds with each other.

Tim Osmondson provides more insight:

If marketing changes up campaigns daily without some formula for consistent messaging, these companies may fail. Brand consistency and key messaging of a company are absolutely necessary for the marketing department to create, initiate and replicate into every person's job description and company focus throughout the firm. A sales department only cares about the immediate results and marketing's responsibility to provide qualified, solid leads. This is only accomplished each day, every week, month and year if all employees follow a clear path and put into practice your company goals and commitments and follow the key messaging presented, over and over again.

The How: Break the cycle of opposition

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hank Stroll (Hank@InternetVIZ.com) is publisher at InternetVIZ, a custom publisher of 24 B2B e-newsletters reaching 490,000 business executives.