I think marketers are afraid of sales people. There, I said it. We try hard not to let it show and many of us are probably not even aware of it, but I think that at the centre of many sales vs. marketing showdowns is a terrified marketer and a bewildered salesperson.
At the risk of generalizing, here is why I think this is the case. Salespeople are persuaders. Their job is to take shot after shot after shot at getting their customer to buy something. A colleague once described sales as water: always able to find a way to seep in. So if you’re any good at all at selling, you’re not particularly put off when someone says no. No just means you need to try something else, push a little harder, cut a better deal, build a bit more trust.
Marketers aren’t good at no. No means you’ve failed, you suck, , you should hand in your Starbucks card and go home. So it’s little wonder that conversations between the two so often go horribly sideways. Marketers feel beaten up by their aggressive counterparts and sales feels like nobody is listening to them.
A common battleground is the Marketing Program. Those elegant, intricate programs designed to crush the competition and become business school cases that will enshrine your genius for future generations. The ones where you spend weeks crunching the numbers, begging the Hand-Wringers to look away and stalking your Corporate Overlords through airport lounges to get a sign-off. The ones you spend weeks more briefing and briefing and briefing your agency about so they can ignore you and run down the clock with creative they pitched unsuccessfully to your competition last year (is that bitter?). The programs where you spend days making your Powerpoint just perfect and stuffing loot bags with branded stress balls, coffee mugs and foam puzzle cubes. Heck, you even shave your legs in anticipation of the sales launch where the audience rises as one in adulation and crowd surfs you to that corner office.
Of course we all know what happens next. There is no applause. No crowd surf. Just blank stares and clicking Blackberries. The silence finally breaks when they start with the questions. Why is the pricing so high? How will orders work? How do I get paid? Followed by the comments. Looks complicated. Our competitors did it three years ago. We did it two years ago and it didn’t work. I can’t sell that in my territory/base/vertical/socks. I didn’t get a coffee mug. And on and on it goes.
The marketers in the room hear rejection. All of this sounds like a great big No. They want to cry. But on the other side of the table, the sales people hear ideas. A great big Possibility. They want to believe.
Just like in the stage play of Peter Pan where a dim light is Tinkerbell, the idea lives. Your idea! Your job, like Peter’s, is to get the sales team to believe. To sell your ass off and have your program blaze into being like Tinkerbell without the pixie dust (hard to get out of the carpet).
That’s right, folks. You need to SELL your ideas to sales. Their comments and questions aren’t anything more than a dress rehearsal for their first few sales calls. They need to understand how the program works from all angles. They need to start figuring out how to get around and through the customers’ objections and questions. So suck it up and stop taking it personally and invest more time in preparing your sales pitch than chosing the muffins for the kick off meeting.
Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
escwilliams@gmail.com
follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bizmkter
