This article originates from a panel at the Revenue Marketing Summit in New York, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.
The battle between sales and marketing has been raging for years. Is it a case of one team winning out over the other, or is it more of a symbiotic relationship?
To explore the ways in which sales and marketing can work together to drive business success, we brought together a panel of revenue marketing experts:
🔷 Tobes Kelly, VP of Revenue and Product Marketing at Transfix
🔷 Mary Costa, Co-Founder, and CMO at Better & Better
🔷 David H. Dancer, Interim CMO at NGDATA and FutureMethod
Read on for their hard-won insights on how to bring both teams together for revenue marketing gold, including:
- The roots of misalignment between sales and marketing
- Sharing KPIs with sales
- How to show the marketing team's value
- Uniting sales and marketing under one umbrella
- Building bridges between sales and marketing
- How to share marketing wins with the organization
The roots of the misalignment between sales and marketing
Tobes Kelly
We are here to discuss an alignment issue, and so my first question is what are some of the underlying reasons for misalignment between sales and marketing?
Mary Costa
While a lot of companies are pivoting and realigning, I think there’s a foundational problem that goes back decades: the idea of marketing being a cost center while sales is viewed as a revenue-generating center.
That mentality starts at the top and funnels all the way down through the organization. Plus, these two functions have historically been separate.
However, I think we’re now moving in a more collaborative direction. I mean, here we are talking about revenue marketing, which is ultimately the intersection of these two areas. That misalignment still does exist, though we're seeing a lot of positive movement.
David H. Dancer
There are lots of things that can potentially go into this misalignment, but a big one is that marketing has often been positioned as a service organization, here simply to serve everyone else.
Two things that salespeople have said to me over the years that have stuck in my mind are, “I mean, you just hit the button and send an email, right?” and, “Your team will make it pretty!”
I think it’s really important that we share roles and educate each other so that we can all understand how each team contributes. Aligning KPIs is essential to overcome this misalignment too.
