The Marriage – Um – Divorce Between Marketing and Sales

February 6, 2011 at 4:30 pm | Posted in Adrian Miller Sales Training, Adrian's Network, Branding, Marketing, New York Sales Trainer, sales, Sales Training, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

We all know the story that marketing and sales go hand-in-hand. I mean it’s a fact right? You can have a pretty terrific marketing campaign that might even win awards, gets recognition and all that good stuff and STILL not get you the ROI that you want (read that as increased new business).

Equally true is that a sales person should always be able to get better results when they have effective marketing materials to help them tell their sales story.

This is all very simple.

Then why is it that so many marketing campaigns are created without much of a thought…ok, real thought to what comes after the marketing.

What happens if and when the sales reps following up on the marketing campaign are just not able to close the business?

I’ll tell you what happens.

• The company decides that the marketing program wasn’t “really” effective.
• The marketing firm gets put on notice and bad-mouthed for not producing new business.
• The company decides that marketing stinks and is irrelevant to their success.

One or all of the above.

And if just isn’t true.

I’m a sales trainer and I see marketing campaigns from a different perspective.

I see campaigns started without a thought to what is going to happen afterwards and when results are poor everyone seems confused and unhappy.

And of course the lack of response could have been avoided if only if the sales portion of the campaign was in place BEFORE the marketing efforts were deployed. YES—what happens after the mail is dropped, the website goes live, the email is sent, the ads appear, the telemarketers generate interest…that’s where sales jumps in.

Heck, let us be part of the plan!

All of you marketing firms out there—wouldn’t your clients be even more satisfied if you made certain that the pieces of the follow-up sales game lined up and ready to go. Sales process? Check. Lead follow-up procedures? Check. Sales reps trained and skills refresher provided? Check. CRM and touch point management strategy developed? Check.
You get the idea.

Don’t start one more campaign without talking to your client about their sales follow-up. They’ll thank you for it!

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