Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Sometimes Opposites Don’t Attract

Considering the number of dysfunctional marketing/sales relationships I have either observed first-hand or heard about from friends and colleagues, I’ve rarely actually met a marketing or sales professional who deserved to be part of this unfortunate drama. The truth is that most marketing professionals really do want to help sales be more successful. They understand that if sales wins, their company wins—and so they win. And they’re great at what they do. Likewise, most salespeople work hard to make their numbers any way they can, and a lot of them are really awesome at the art of selling. Why then is this relationship the source of so much conflict?

The bottom line is that the marketing and sales professions are very different, and so they attract people with starkly different personality types. As we saw in Chapter 2, marketing departments emerged alongside sales teams. They were put there because they could complement the sales function by implementing ideas and strategies that applied to entire customer categories rather than just to individual customers.

Contrary to what many salespeople seem to believe, companies did not “invent” marketing departments to serve as vaguely irritating cost centers. But the jobs and personalities of great marketing and sales professionals are so distinct that their teams usually fail to understand what makes the other tick. They don’t see what motivates the other, and they get little help in doing so from their ...