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close coordination of marketing and sales

What is usually a broad chasm between the marketing department and the sales organization is narrow in top sales organizations. The right hand should know what the left hand is doing, and why. Both groups should focus on the customer and coordinate their activities to provide the best solutions for the customer-even if they have to create solutions on the fly to satisfy customer needs. They should work closely together to develop solutions, attractive pricing, and customer incentives.

One of the key factors that reduced this gap between sales and marketing in the 1980s was the quality initiatives. The companies that did a good job of implementing a strong quality program tended to end up with a strong sense of cooperation between sales and marketing. This makes sense, given that the primary goal of quality programs was to figure out how to focus better on the customer.

Xerox Corporation, which in 1989 won the Malcolm Baldrige Award, presented by the U.S. Department of Commerce to companies that exemplify the best in American business, for its Leadership Through Quality Program, is an example of a company that attained a close working relationship between sales and marketing. As Scott Bradley, a vice president at Xerox, said, Our quality program really helps us to focus on the customer requirements, both external and internal, in order to make certain that we are creating customer value. And, one of the keys for us is when our marketing and sales organizations work closely together. 1

Xerox was by no means the only company to effectively coordinate sales and marketing activities. Procter & Gamble used a team selling approach to literally force cooperation between marketing and sales by including people from brand marketing and sales, and also key management personnel, on the sales teams that work with megachains such as Kroger, Wal-Mart, and Target. Salespeople who

fail to keep their focus on the customer begin to fall into sales traps. They become too aggressive, fail to relate the product to the customers needs, and fail to recognize potential champions.

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sales trap 1:

You Must Be Aggressive to Succeed in Sales

Heres the idea: You have to be aggressive to succeed in sales.

This mistaken belief is widely held. But when salespeople believe they need to be aggressive, and when they are aggressive, they focus on the wrong thing: themselves. Aggressiveness reduces sales effectiveness because it reduces what should be your outside focus on the customer.

the cultural stereotype of the obnoxious salesperson

Everyone recognizes the cultural stereotype of the obnoxious salesperson. At the beginning of each semester in the class I teach on sales management and consultative marketing, I ask my students to raise their hands if they want to be salespeople. Although the thirty to forty students who have registered for the class clearly know that theyre taking a career-oriented sales class, only about three in ten students will raise his or her hand.

Why is it that you wouldnt want to pursue a sales career? I then ask the others.

I dont want to be obnoxious is the most common answer.

These students dont want to be salespeople because they think salespeople have to be aggressive or-worse yet-obnoxious if they are to succeed. Some students tone their answers down and say they dont feel its in their nature to be as persistent or to bug customers as much as they think they will have to. (Persistence is an important ingredient in sales success, as I discuss shortly.)

The idea that you have to be aggressive in order to succeed in sales is practically universal. Corporate recruiters report that in recruiting interviews, students mention their aggressiveness as a positive attribute that will lead to their success on the job. However, the recruiters arent necessarily looking for aggressiveness, because it is not tied to sales success.