How Did the Walls Get so High?

I always wondered how the walls between marketing and sales grew so high that they seem unscalable now. This wasn't always the case.

Early in my marketing career at IBM, I worked with a stellar sales team who really appreciated the relationship and the insight and assistance product marketing could provide. Back then, we didn't have dedicated sales engineers. So, it was product marketing who was invited out on prospect visits to assist consultatively in the sale. Those relationships gave both marketing and sales a deep appreciation for each other's strengths. The joint work that ultimately brought in those won deals bound us together.

When I joined Sun Microsystems, we had a dedicated sales and sales engineer team that worked very cooperatively with the product marketing team. Again, product marketing was invited to assist on sales calls. We presented our products. We even trained the sales team on how to effectively sell the product.

Then came the explosion of the World Wide Web and it seems like everything changed. Product marketers now had a new medium for presenting their content - the Internet. Their workload saw manifold increases. With less time to nurture the relationships with sales, marketing started throwing their internal content onto shared intranets for consumption (or not) by the sales team. Without the regular contact with sales, product marketers lost their access to critical information about the prospects and the sales cycle. Sales was left to their own devices to complete the sale.

Along came permission marketing and online newsletters. Marketing's focus shifted to driving lead generation volume. As marketing programs connected with prospects, those leads were thrown across the wall to sales, never to be heard about again. Marketing suspected that sales wasn't really doing anything with those leads, but they had no way of really knowing. Sales found the volume of the leads rather daunting and the value of those leads questionable.

The advent of Customer Relationship Management systems only further highlighted how high the wall between marketing and sales had grown. Marketing now had a way to prove that sales wasn't doing anything with the leads they generated. They could see all of those marketing dollars spent on developing leads going to waste. Sales was cast in the role of the culprit and marketing in the role of the police.

This is where I find many companies today. The connection between marketing and sales is broken and in some cases hostile. The organizations no longer share common goals. Marketing loses, sales loses, and the company loses. With so many resources available to us, we have lost the most valuable resource of all - strong marketing and sales relationships.

It is imperative that these walls be broken down. My next post will discuss ways to build stronger marketing and sales cooperation.