Krug: Aligning the splendid nuances of marketing and sales

If you’re at all like me, you probably love talking with marketing people – and probably would do so all day long if given the opportunity. Does anyone have more vitality, more creativity or more boundless imagination? Uh, no. Not even close. But when you want to migrate that chat with the marketers over to sales, well, that can be about as welcome as introducing religion, politics or something even more personal and potentially confrontational (the National Football League, for example) into a cocktail conversation. Oddly enough, shifting gears from sales over to the topic of marketing can have the same effect on a fair number of sales discussions. I’ve struggled to understand the gap between marketers and sales professionals. (Can’t we all just get along?) But when you take a moment and think about it… Marketing is hopeful and creative and a forum where brilliant ideas can be bandied about without consequences or pressures. Unicorns with sparklers in their ears start to prance about during marketing conversations. The world is just this lovely orb of promise when in some discussions among marketers. Sales? That ties directly to a P&L. And midmonth progress reports. And to someone whose shirtsleeves have been rolled up so lightly that their forearms look like Popeye’s and whose jugular vein is bulging from his or her neck as if they might implode and take out the entire cubicle farm. Marketing people wear orange socks and blue suede oxfords with jeans and a loose-fitting camp shirt. Sales people can wear whatever they want, as long as it’s a black or blue suit, corresponding black shoes, a black belt and socks that look as if they have been starched. On Fridays, they get chill and wear a corporate polo and slacks pressed so straight and smooth that you could cut a diamond on the crease. Marketing discussions often go off to a place where there is no such thing as a bad idea. It’s this lovely disconnected and free-flowing, freeform jazz performance in front of a festival crowd. I swear, I’ve looked up from some marketing discussions and swore that I had just seen vendors hocking falafels and pouring cups of import beers. Sales calls, in challenging times anyway, hold all of the joy of asking the best-looking girl in the universe to the prom in front of your best friends, your parents, and all of your friends from the old neighborhood while wearing no pants. Sales meetings can possess all of the warm and fuzzy of chalk-talks conducted by Vince Lombardi when the team is trailing by 30 points at halftime. Sales strategy meetings can be as thoroughly entertaining as a root canal on a root canal on a root canal administered by a dentist whose tool kit is composed of a saw, a hammer and a pint of Jim Beam. Marketing can be little more than a theorized series of great outcomes that flow one after the next. They are the primrose path to the yellow brick road to the stairway to heaven. Sales is the Folsom prison blues before thirty days in the hole on the connector ramp to the highway to hell. Or are sales and marketing any of those things? They shouldn’t be. When I try to rationalize the relationship between marketing and sales, I look at it through this lens: Marketing is anything that leads to a sale. Sales is the completion of a well-conceived marketing plan. The best marketers have the sale in mind. The best sales people know how to tap into opportunities created by marketers. The best marketers never stop selling ideas. The best sales people never stop marketing their ideas back to the marketing team, feeding them insights, data and reaction from the front line. Marketing isn’t any more of a standalone department than sales is a standalone department. Marketing and sales are points on the same wheel. And when neither is held up as being more important than the other, when neither competes with the other and when neither trumps the other, they exist in this incredible place where success flows like wine. What? Not in your organization, you say? Little-M marketing is a subset of Big-S sales? Marketing’s function is to pick out the fonts for the sales brochure, and sales’ function is to drive the revenue that pays for the balloons that are hung around the tote board that tracks sales progress? And the sales team had to hang up its own balloons last time because the marketing team was on a retreat somewhere in the woods singing folk songs and dancing in front of a raging fire in the hope of conjuring the next great idea? That doesn’t sounds like any organization that I’d want to be part of or any company that’s taking a hard look at who it wants to be, or that has looked at the calendar to notice that this is 2014. Best efforts between marketing and sales cannot be about hostage negotiations or hostile takeovers. Best efforts are far more like moments of simple, orchestrated brilliance – the kind of Lombardi’s Power Sweep, in which the pulling guard takes out the play-side linebacker and creates a hole wide enough to allow an H-1 Hummer to pass through. The best marketing and sales teams are a universal team, hitched at the hips, forging ahead. Marketing is anything leading to a sale. A sale is everything to creating the next marketing strategy. Neither is more important to the other, because neither amounts to much of anything without the other.

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 As always, stay classy. Chris Krug is president of the progressive media communications firm No Limit Agency* in Chicago. No Limit is a full-service agency whose practice focuses on strategy, brand management, creative campaigns and delivering unparalleled earned placement in the media. No Limit Agency works with some of the best-known and fastest-growing brands in North America, and that’s not a coincidence. Contact Krug by calling 312-526-3996 or via email at [email protected].