Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams Balanced?

To avoid strife between sales and marketing teams, companies must keep the teams balanced. An equitable distribution of responsibilities, budget, and goals can solve many problems before they start.

When there’s imbalance, one team will blame the other for poor revenue or productivity 99 percent of the time.  To create a sense of parity, many companies are blending sales and marketing teams so that they are jointly invested in every stage of product promotion and sales. However, even if teams are separated by division, it is still possible to achieve a shared sense of vision and duty by focusing on the shared obligation to the customer.

Balancing power and responsibilities to the customer

Marketers and salespeople often war over who has the real power to affect company growth and revenue. This can be an issue whether teams are integrated or separate. Even in an integrated division where marketing and sales comprise one team, there is argument over whether sales associates or the marketers are the dominant force behind decision-making.

To create a sense of equal power, some companies have the sales and marketing teams sharing customer-related duties. Typically, marketers handle promotion and lead generation, leaving salespeople to focus on making deals and building long term customer relationships.  Under the unified customer focus, both teams share the burden of developing product messaging for customers, product rollout, product positioning, developing territories, cultivating leads and getting conversions.

To usher in this culture of shared duty, consider joint sales and marketing training, then joint meetings and workshops, followed by coordinated customer efforts that demand prospects receive influence from both teams concurrently. Many progressive companies are practicing some if not all of these strategies. The result is that both teams become further invested in meeting the needs of every prospect.

Balancing customer-related budget expenditures

Sales and marketing teams often quibble over which department spends the most money, with the sales staff criticizing the cost of promotions and marketing folks taking issue with the large allotment for commissions.  Balance has been difficult with many companies trending toward expanded marketing budgets.

According to a 2014 CMO Survey, companies across the nation are devoting more dollars to marketing, with the marketing division spending more on digital advertising, social media marketing and marketing analytics.  However, roughly 70 percent of firms are focusing on equally dividing the budget for customer management between the sales division and the marketing division.  This trend continues the focus of unifying teams through customer needs.

Balanced goals for the customer

Many companies are holding both sales and marketing teams responsible for customer goals and are pairing specific salespeople with specific marketers to form small groups that are focused on specific customer segments when it comes to the following goals:

• More customer purchases
• Higher dollar amount spent by  customer per purchase or per unit
• More upsells (sells of related goods or services).
• More customer acquisitions
• Increased retention of customers

It’s hard to ensure balance at every turn. However, by balancing marketing and sales teams around specific customer-based tasks and objectives; bickering related to the functions of the different teams can subside. Not only are customers better served by this balance, but company performance is enhanced.