Sales & Marketing - A Beautiful Friendship

There is a scene at the very end of Casablanca in which Rick (Humphrey Bogart) looks to his former adversary Louis (Claude Rains) and says, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" as they walk into the night fog.

Rick and Louis, though at loggerheads during most of the movie, find that in the end they have the same shared sense of purpose. Much like Sales and Marketing teams have the same shared sense of purpose - drive top line revenue.

The problem is that both groups tend to have very different views as to the best way of achieving this goal, leading to behavior that is potentially non-productive to down right destructive. Sales feels that the folks in Marketing don't understand what actually happens in the real day-to-day world with customers, while Marketing feels Sales doesn't understand their work or properly use the tools they've developed.

I have seen this dynamic play out in every organization I've worked with. One of my first experiences was during a sales management course at Emory where two earnest twenty something MBA students, one having worked in sales at P&G and the other in P&G's brand management, got into a very heated discussion about who was better equipped to market and sell toilet paper!

It does not have to be this way. Marketing and Sales are two sides of the same coin and to be effective each must respect and work with the other. In most mid-sized companies, the staffing and resources are constrained so there simply isn't room for friction between the two groups.

Don't get me wrong, healthy discussion and disagreement are part of the deal. But if both groups agree on the ultimate goals, then the discussion will be about how we get there, not where we are going.

I'll never forget a comment by the newly hired VP of Operations at a former company who observed how I, then a Marketing Manager, and our National Sales Manager interacted. He was trying to play us off each other and finally said, "What are you two doing getting along? I thought sales and marketing people aren't suppose to like each other!"

Save yourself unneeded heartburn. Before the week is out, sit down with your counter part in sales or marketing and go over both your priority lists. Are the two of you on the same page? Is marketing providing the leads and support that sales needs? Is sales providing the customer feedback and market intelligence that marketing needs to make better decisions? Do you both have mutual plans being executed that will lead to more revenue?

Use this dicussion as an opportunity for the beginning of a beautiful business friendship.