Rob Kaminoff

Did you know that:

• Approximately one-half  of the material Marketing generates for Sales never gets used?

• Salespeople typically spend about 40% of their time creating customer-facing collateral rather than selling?

• Only 10%-15% of the collateral Sales produces is consistent with corporate strategy and messaging?

I am dismayed by the lack of cooperation I often see between sales and marketing within B2B companies. Each frequently blames the other when things aren’t going so well.  Each typically tries to take the credit when things actually do go well.   This post looks at some of the causes of this dysfunctional relationship and how to begin to bridge the gap.  I realize that I’ll be throwing around a lot of generalities and stereotypes here, but I have enough experience on both sides of the fence (sometimes laced with barbed wire) to verify that these issues are more prevalent than we would like to think.

How Marketing Perceives Sales

Sales people are typically viewed as more opportunistic than strategic.  They chase down short-term opportunities,  sometimes to the detriment of their company’s long-term goals.  This is also known as the cowboy or lone ranger mentality, inspired by their sales personalities and how they are compensated: commissions on sales.   These one-off deals make it difficult for the company’s development and customer service teams to deliver what the salesperson has promised.   These teams become distracted from their main mission, which is to cost-effectively support the company’s mainstream customers and applications.  For companies that are tying to develop and support a common business platform, these one-offs can be devastating.

Salespeople are also accused of not following instructions, another aspect of the cowboy mentality.  They might come back from an expensive trade show with a bunch of business cards, with little information as to who these prospects are (other than their titles and company names), and whether they were just interested in picking up one of your logo-clad stress balls or truly represent a qualified lead.  So how can the salespeople prioritize who to call on when they return to the office? And what does this do to the ROI of your trade show investment?

How Sales Perceives Marketing

Marketing folks, on the other hand, are perceived as operating in an ivory tower, without really understanding what’s going on in the field.  They frequently want to focus on relatively glamorous, news worthy messages. I remember leading the sales effort of a Silicon Alley interactive agency in the late 1990s.  While most of our customers were seeking first generation websites for their dial-up consumers, the marketing department was talking about its capabilities to bring rich media (e.g., videos) to the web.   This provided a distinction from all of the other interactive agencies at the time, which impressed some venture capitalists and reporters, but was entirely impractical until broadband internet access became more prevalent many years down the road.   By that time, the agency went bankrupt (in fairness, so did most of the others!).

Marketing collateral is supposed to soften-up customers so that they are predisposed to buy from your salespeople.   When there is a disconnect between customer needs and your company’s selling proposition, marketers are not supporting their salespeople in the field.

How to Restore a Healthy Relationship Between Marketing & Sales

• Get drunk together (seriously).  This is how many sales get closed.  It will help all parties become less defensive and hopefully more cooperative going forward.  Just one cautionary note for the marketing folks:  the sales guys (and gals) will drink you under the table!
• Make sure that the development of Marketing Plans is a cross-functional effort that needs to be owned by Marketing, but requires input from–and output to–Sales, Customer Service, Engineering and Operations (as applicable).  The delivery organizations need to be able to deliver what marketing promises and all functions of the company have an impact on the customer’s  perception of the brand.  Marketing needs to lead the way with market research, competitive and business case analysis, but cannot do so without input from the various functional organizations.
• Agree on who needs to cover the “overlap” between marketing and sales.  Some call it Sales Support, some call it Marketing Support (therein lies part of the problem!).   Regardless,  its important to integrate sales operations with marketing operations.
• If you don’t already have one,  develop a formal process for  how leads are collected, prioritized and communicated to salespeople and how marketing, in turn, receives feedback on lead outcomes.  This is critical so that marketers can measure the ROI of the marketing campaigns that generated the leads in the first place.   Use of a formal salesforce automation tool, or a full-blown CRM system, is helpful here.
• Hold regular meetings between marketing and sales, with real agendas, to ensure that communication is an ongoing process. Marketers should ask salespeople directly about what they are experiencing in the field.  What competitors are they meeting in the market?  Which tactics are working and which aren’t'? Salespeople should ask marketers for strategic direction, as well as tactical tools (e.g., scripts, templates, collateral) to execute the strategy in the field.
• Marketing should continuously update the marketing calendar and make it easily accessible to sales.  This calendar should should list and describe all upcoming advertising campaigns, press releases, events, new product releases, updates to collateral, etc.

These solutions are all about better communication between the people in marketing and sales.  The first step is to recognize that the two disciplines attract people with very different personalities.   The next step is to communicate in more productive ways, both formally and informally.  Finally, you need to instill and codify a culture of cooperation and mutual respect.  Maybe then we will be all be able to sing from the same sheet of music, which should be written by marketing with input from sales!

What do you think?

See Marketing Sherpa’s excellent article on how marketing and sales can collaborate to score and prioritize leads

Last Sunday, it became clear that some of the changes to Facebook’s Terms of Service (ToS) enacted earlier in the month were detrimental to users’ privacy and granted the company total control over the content you share on their site.   Facebook changed the ToS to to say it owns any content you upload to the site until hell freezes over, even after you delete your profile.  This means they could reuse any of your content whenever and wherever it want. More specifically Facebook declared they have an:

“irrevocable “perpetual” license to “use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, [and] adapt” any content you’ve ever uploaded, including the option to “use your name, likeness and image for any purpose”

What nerve! This authorizes Facebook to steal your content and violate your privacy.   So will you see that funky profile photo, that was only meant for friends,  on a Facebook ad?

This change provoked a formal federal complaint form the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) with the Federal Trade Commission over the social network’s updated licenses.

The opposition was not limited to official organizations like EPIC.  More than 38,000 Facebook user joined a group that protested the new ToS.   It turns out that Facebook users are not willing to sell their soles in order to socialize with their friends online.

By Tuesday, Facebook did an About Face, declaring that it was reverting, at least temporarily, to the old terms of service.  These old (and current) ToS aren’t particularly safeguarding users privacy either, for that matter.  It states:

“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing”

So how much of a change is this really? We’ll these terms clearly state that Facebook does not own your copyright.   But in copyright law, the fact they have a non-exclusive license, with all of the rights they attach to it, means virtually the same thing.

The moral of the ToS on many social networking sites is that you must vigorously protect your social reputation online.  Be careful about: what you say and the photos and videos that you upload.  What would your mom or your boss say about the information that you share with “friends” (often strangers) online?  This also applies to other social networking venues.  Most people are very careful about what they put in their LinkedIn profiles and status, because these are typically used professionally, but you may behave less “responsibly” on such sites as Facebook,  MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

Stay tuned on this one, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that he wants the Facebook community to have input in the next iterations of the company’s ToS.

Meanwhile, how do YOU manage your online reputation while having fun in the various social networks in which you participate?

You may be interested in reading some of the other takes on this latest Facebook SNAFU at:

• Facebook Still Owns You (geeksaresexy.net)
• Facebook Reverts Terms of Service After Complaints (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook’s about-face: Change we can believe in? (news.cnet.com
• Facebook backs down on privacy terms (news.cnet.com)
• Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.” [Your Rights] (consumerist.com)
• Naive Facebook Users Cry Over Mythical Privacy “Rights” (mymediamusings.com)
• Facebook terms of service - changed, defended and revoked (nickburcher.com)
• Power in Numbers forces Facebook to Reverts to Old Terms of Use (thenextweb.com)
• Facebook ‘New Terms’ Caption Competition Winner! (thenextweb.com)