Business Development For Dummies

Chapter 12

Forming a Winning Team: Marketing and Sales Cohesion

In This Chapter

Aligning sales and marketing to increase revenue

Helping marketing and sales get along

A growing services business has to expand its strategies for reaching more and more prospective customers as well as retaining and growing existing ones. Doing the same old thing year after year just doesn’t hack it.

When acquiring new customers, the burden of effort falls on marketing and sales, but unfortunately these functions often don’t see eye to eye. In the most extreme cases, they’re severely at odds, with finger-pointing if the results are lower than management wants. Yet one of the keys to successful business development is having marketing and sales operating in concert. Research from the Aberdeen Group (in 2010) reveals that companies grow faster when marketing and sales co-operate effectively.

This chapter explains why collaboration is necessary and explores how to achieve that aim and produce maximum results. I look at where the divide between sales and marketing arises and suggest ways to make sure that the two parties play nicely in the sandbox, avoid problems (watch out for any submerged cat-mess mines!) and build one whopping big sandcastle.

‘We Can Work It Out’: Sales and Marketing Join Forces ...