Having problems getting sales and marketing to work together? After yesterday’s post, Missing the Boat by Not Connecting Sales to Marketing, Ben Slayter asked for some help with methods to integrate marketing and sales. What will work for your organization depends on a lot of issues, including personnel, politics, organizational structure, and executive management, just to name a few. Marketing and sales functions, while similar, still require quite different skills and knowledge (and talent), so the idea is to get marketing and sales to work together, not necessarily be the same people. Here are three general methods for connecting marketing and sales that may work for your organization:
Top-Down
It’s almost always easiest if you have buy-in at the top of the organization (almost). However, there still can be huge obstacles in terms of getting the people on the front-lines to actually change how they’re operating. In this situation, it’s very important to get everyone involved and talk about why they change is important and how it can help each individual. Try to relate to individual people, not just sales and marketing as groups. Use individual goals and problems to illustrate how working together will make day-to-day work easier and more effective.
Work as a team to plan out how the changes are going to implemented. Do new tools need to be put into place? Are new responsibilities required? Do new goals need to be set to make sure changes happen? How change is going to be implemented is almost as important as getting everyone to buy-in. Taking extra time before changes go into effect can help identify and solve key problems.
A change in how marketing and sales operate is likely to impact the entire organization (or at least large parts of it). If you need new tools and processes, does IT and Finance need to be involved? Make sure you identify anyone who will either be affected or is needed to make implementation successful.
Middle-Out
If you’re in the middle of the organization chart, don’t dispair. You can still help get change started. If your boss isn’t interested in sponsoring any change, try to find like-minded folks on the other side of the fence and figure out what you can do to make each others jobs easier. This can be difficult without additional resources and tools, but you may find that much of the connections come just from sharing information. Once you’ve been working together for awhile, go to your management as a team to present how you’ve been able to be more effective. Try to use business metrics, as well as easy-to-understand graphs and charts. You need to sell your case, so make sure your case is on stable footing first (and obviously make sure everyone is still doing their jobs and everything that’s expected by them — this project may have to be something that you work on in spare time).
Bottom-Up
Bottom-up can be one of the most difficult methods to creating change, but it’s still certainly possible. Similar to Middle-out, the idea is to try to put some of the changes into place without any official buy-in (assuming you can’t get official buy-in, that’s always the safest route). Again, try to figure out what changes you can make without having additional resources and tools. There are strength in numbers, so getting others to help and also make changes is the easiest way to get buy-in from the top.
Demonstrating Success
Whatever the method, the idea is to first try to get some sort of support and buy-in from your management. If that fails, demonstrating success is usually the easiest way to gain support of management, especially if success can be shown in terms of business metrics (revenue, cost savings, time savings, etc.). Changes for businesses shouldn’t be done willy-nilly, so if you’re trying to get your organization to make a change, you need to think in terms of what the change will do for the business (and for the people of the organization). You need to build a solid case and then effectively sell that case to management.
What do you think? What other methods or ideas do you have for connecting marketing & sales?
(photo by seier+seier, on Flickr)