In many years of working as sales and marketing executives at a wide range of companies, Laura Nuhaan and Robert Hylkema, the managing partners of The Andeta Group repeatedly experienced the damage to companies whose Sales and Marketing functions worked poorly together or didn’t get along.
Too often, Marketing accuses Sales of being too focused on specific customers and deals and blind of the future. For their part, Sales tends to believe that Marketing is out of touch with customer needs and spends too much money. The rise of marketing and sales automation and social media tools, which were supposed to help the situation, have only increased the friction.
There is no question that when Sales and Marketing work well together, especially with the help of enabling technologies, companies see substantial improvement in performance: sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs decrease, and the cost of sales is lower.