Marketing and Sales have been dating for years and it’s no longer OK for Sales and Marketing to have a causal relationship.  If Marketing is my daughter and her boyfriend is Sales, then I have to put my foot down and say…enough dating…it’s time to get married.  Take a look at the current situation, I think you will agree.

They live separately

When your relationship is casual, you maintain your own places.  Marketing lives in a cute garden apartment and Sales lives in a downtown loft.  They don’t share anything, they spend time separately, Marketing has girls’ night out and Sales has guys’ night out.  Their communication is sporadic at best and it is obvious, they just aren’t on the same page.

They don’t share finances

They don’t pool their money. They don’t share expenses and they don’t leverage economies of scale.  For instance, they both pay rent, utilities, and don’t have any family memberships at the gym.  Let’s face it; they are wasting a lot of money because they don’t work together.

They sound different

They don’t sound as if they are on the same page.  When I talk to Marketing she tells me one story and when I talk to Sales I hear something completely different.  Marketing is always interrupting me with her advertising speak and Sales is constantly talking about feature this and benefit that.  This is a big challenge for the people around them, especially the people they want to be close to, their prospects.

They don’t complement each other

Their personalities are so different.  Sales is pushy and Marketing tries to show me how smart she is.  She has all the answers.  And then there are the spats.  Marketing thinks Sales is the problem and Sales thinks Marketing is the problem.  They really need to be a team if they want to achieve their lifelong goals.

But what if they got married?

If they got married, transforming them from two individuals, Sales and Marketing, into a Revenue Department.   Think about it, what if they worked together as a single unit, a team.

• What if Marketing and Sales said the same thing?  What if their approach was aligned, educating, helping, advising and counseling prospects all the way through the purchase cycle?  The sales presentation would match the messaging on the website.  The sales people would be providing educational content and nurturing their leads, helping prospects feel safe and secure.
• What if they pooled their money, they could accomplish so much more.  They would eliminate the unproductive things they did like advertising, trade shows and costly golf outings and focus on the highest return activities like websites, email campaigns, lead nurturing, content creation and social media management.  They might even get on a budget and track the performance of their investments with a tool like HubSpot.
• What if they lived together, working on challenges and focused on the single task…driving revenue.  They would understand each other so much better and be a tightly knit, integrated team.  Think about the potential.
• They could do things together like create educational videos that highlighted the sales people so when they finally met their prospects, the prospects already felt like they knew them, liked them and trusted them.  What a warm, friendly feeling that would leave with potential clients.
• And most importantly, their goals were aligned.  Their hopes and dreams now one.  To build their Revenue Department into the Revenue Machine their parents hoped and dreamed of when they started their own families.

While the analogy is cute and I hope it got you to chuckle, this is becoming the new model in businesses of all sizes.  The Revenue Department is an aligned model where sales and marketing are a single team working together to drive one single measure, revenue.

To learn more about the Revenue Department, click here to request the first chapter of the new book Fire Your Sales Team Today.

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