Who Leads - Sales or Marketing?
For many small B2B companies, it is not uncommon for Sales to lead, and for Marketing to be in a support role. After all, Sales speaks to prospects everyday and knows what buyers want. Marketing organizes the events, produces marketing materials, manages the website, sends out email blasts, and posts on social media. Marketing is in a sales enablement role.
As the company grows, change is inevitable. Now there is a larger direct sales force, plus inside sales, and affiliate channels to manage. It can be the wild west. Every prospect looks different. Every deal looks different. Revenue is starting to plateau. Marketing needs to move from its support role to a leadership role.
Marketing brings the disciplines of market research & analysis, segmentation, and financial modeling to identify the best opportunities for product / market fit, as well as for sales revenue & profit. It defines the target market and ideal customer profile. Most importantly, it formulates a marketing strategy to generate demand with its target market. Simply put, Marketing hands Sales a roadmap of who to sell to, and what to say to get them to buy. Then it starts to feed qualified leads to the Sales organization. The marketing “engine” is humming.
Now there is a common understanding of target accounts. There is consistent messaging for value proposition and competitive positioning. There is also standard pricing.
Although Marketing is now in a leadership role, Sales remains a vocal partner in developing the strategy. Sales and Marketing need to work closely together and each be accountable for their roles in the company's strategy. This is how B2B companies grow and scale.
Friction between sales and market usually centers around lead generation. This process can become quite siloed, where marketing generates leads and “throws them over the wall” to sales, without follow-up or analysis. This has been proven to be a dysfunctional process. Today’s organizations integrate sales and marketing in its lead generation activities, qualification criteria, lead management best practices and in its goals for conversions.
Sales & Marketing alignment is sometimes difficult to achieve, depending on the culture of the organization and the personalities of its leaders. Some organizations become siloed and focused on departmental goals over company goals. Leadership needs to understand this, and view Sales & Marketing as a unified team with two different categories of skill-sets.