The Marketing Leaders - Kiss and make up: Sales and Marketing Departments can be Friends

Clarence So of Salesforce.com discusses the gap between sales and marketing professionals, and outlines some ways to bridge it.

Sales versus marketing: you wouldn’t think we all had the same goal. In all of business, no two departments are expected to work so closely together, and yet have so many prejudices and misunderstandings about each other.

We’re all familiar with it – marketing delivers the leads, which the sales team neglect to use properly. Marketeers aren’t forwarding properly qualified leads in the first place. The sales team is accountable for every pound that’s spent, but the marketing department is answerable to no-one when it comes to justifying spend. It’s all too easy to get into some serious navel-gazing, which doesn’t help communications between two departments, which rely on each other so heavily.

It seems companies are beginning to take this problem seriously. Some recent research we carried out in the US found that aligning sales and marketing activity is one of the top priorities for sales managers – even higher up the list than analysing customer behaviour, or revising a channel strategy. So how do managers go about bridging this divide and getting the two departments to work together?

Firstly, it may seem obvious, but communication is key. Everybody should be kept updated with all the relevant information – not hard given today’s technology you might think, but you’d be surprised how many companies I come across where this is still a big problem. Information needs to be consistent and objective in order to get buy-in from all sides.

Secondly, it’s important that employees’ roles are clearly defined. What part of the sales and marketing process does a particular role fit in to? Positioning and targets need to be clearly stated – only then can staff take responsibility for their own particular part of the sales cycle, without passing the buck.

CRM: The hub of activity

At the centre of this debate is customer relationship management (CRM), which should be the hub of all activity for sales and marketing personnel, including lead capture and qualification, opportunity creation and even reporting and analysis.

A healthy CRM system ensures information flows smoothly between the two departments, and a good way of doing this is via a ‘marketing dashboard’, which provides snapshots of how business is looking at any given time.

The system available as part of our online CRM offering integrates sales and marketing activity, and highlights metrics from both departments. Users can customise the dashboard so it contains any information they need – from leads generated and converted, to opportunities divided by region to the highest performing sales reps.

Also, all of salesforce.com’s applications run online, via a subscription service rather traditional software which can be costly and time consuming to roll-out. As well as saving on IT spend, this means that users can access the dashboard at any time, from anywhere there’s an Internet connection. Also, the information is continually updated as it is entered in – particularly useful for sales teams monitoring targets in the frenetic run up to month-end.

The industry is growing exponentially every year. Which suits our customers, who themselves tend to be dynamic and fast-expanding. ITN Source is one such company, which houses over 700,000 hours of television and movie footage from ITN, Channel Four, Granada, British Pathé, Reuters, Fox and other specialist sources.

The company grew 40 per cent in 2005, and was finding it increasingly difficult to manage all of its customer activity, including new business leads, and keeping track of existing customers. The company chose to work with salesforce.com to supply a sales management system that would grow with it, and provide easy access to statistics from any location as the business expanded overseas.

ITN Source rolled out SalesforceSFA to 80 of its sales professionals worldwide. Every time ITN Source interacted with its customers, it was recorded in Salesforce in order to create a single, comprehensive view of each and every sales contact.

They provided the company with comprehensive reporting and insight into any situation, from demand for a particular piece of film to the results of multi-channel marketing campaigns, so everyone in the team can see what’s going on. Additionally the system took just three months to roll out, with relatively little expense.

Clarity and technology

So, managers need to communicate, be clear about goals and harness technology to get to the right results. But this is probably the easy bit. What’s next after this rift has been sorted out? How do sales and marketing staff develop skills further?

We are lucky with our customers at salesforce.com, who, like ITN Source, are generally very satisfied, and regularly share ideas with each other. We’ve even set up a dedicated website (www.successforce.com), so our community of customers, users, partners and salesforce.com employees can share ideas and collaborate in order to help each other. Successforce contains information and advice on all aspects of sales and marketing activity.

It hosts message boards, a series of user blogs and user groups, and the ‘Ideas Exchange’, where users can compare and swap ideas. It’s all about people – advice and ideas come from all ends of the community. On the Ideas Exchange, users can suggest improvements they’d like to see to our service, and if enough of the rest of the community likes the idea, the changes happen – it’s as simple as that.

We find this democratic way of working incredibly constructive – who better for users to learn from than other users who are going through the same experiences? It’s a great way for customers to help each other, and to be motivated for success. And if our customers are successful then salesforce.com’s success grows --- it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, an effective dashboard and a forum for ideas and development can help bridge the gap between sales and marketing departments, and can foster a mutual understanding of what’s happening in the company and what the targets are. This way, functions can be better aligned, and streamlined to work together. Which, ultimately, we’d all like to do. Forgive the cliché, but aren’t we all supposed to be singing off the same hymn sheet?

Clarence So joined salesforce.com in its founding year and has spent the past seven years in a variety of executive roles including VP Product Marketing, SVP of Corporate Development and currently Chief Marketing Officer, salesforce.com EMEA.

Prior to salesforce.com, Clarence spent ten years in a variety of engineering, sales, product management, strategic planning and venture capital roles at IBM, Motorola, Arbor Software and US Venture Partners. He holds an MBA from University of California, Berkeley and an Electrical Engineering degree from Queen’s University, Kingston Ontario.



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