Historically, marketing and sales departments have always had problems getting on the same page. It’s a lot like the cartoon the Jetsons and the feud between Cogswell’s Cogs and Spacely’s Sprockets – two similar processes and products with vastly differing perspectives. In our new, free report “What Sales and Marketing Can Learn from ‘The Jetsons’?” We explore how to improve the relationship between your sales and marketing departments.
Problems Caused by Poor Marketing / Sales Department Communication
Whether in-house or outsourced, most organizations pay a lot of money for their sales and marketing teams. So, of course, you want to make sure they’re doing the best job they can (and have the tools necessary to do so).
The problem is that marketing and sales – although they should be working together toward a common goal – often differ in opinion on how to move forward with any new campaign.
Marketing, which typically utilizes a marketing automation system, often thinks that the leads they provide sales aren’t panning out because sales is neglecting leads.
Yet, sales (which typically uses a CRM system) looks at marketing as providing them with poor leads.
When this occurs, sales as a whole suffer and the money spent on sales and marketing departments does not yield the return it needs, which essentially causes funds to go down the drain.
Why do sales and marketing departments have difficulty communicating?
The real problem between sales and marketing is the technology the two departments use and how they interpret data from that technology.
Typically, data isn’t moving between the marketing automation system the marketing department uses and the CRM system the sales department uses.
Over time, this causes a huge disconnect.
Pair that with the following issues and you have a lot of distrust and frustration along with mismanaged campaigns that are nowhere near the level and success that they could be.
- Fuzzy Data – When sales and marketing meet up to discuss strategy they are both usually operating off “fuzzy data” in that their data is not conclusive and, because it is primarily text based, neither department can really bring it to the table in any tangible sense
- Gut Feelings – Because the data is fuzzy, both marketers and the sales team tend to rely on “gut feelings” for what they think the next best approach is to any given campaign. This results in anecdotal arguments, none of which can be proven conclusively by factual data, and this causes a great part of the divide.
- Uneventful Meetings – Fuzzy data and anecdotal gut-feeling arguments result in uneventful meetings and, because both sides cannot typically bring any tangible data to the table it ends with a “we’ll get back to you” response, which could take a week or more, in which case it becomes irrelevant.
How to fix it? A better tool.
In our new free, downloadable report we explain the common problems between marketing and sales departments in greater depth and offer a revolutionary new tool that bridges the gap between marketing and sales using real-time visualized drag-and-drop technology to put both departments on the same page.
Click here to download our paper now.
