B2B sales is very different than the sales of consumer products, most particularly with respect to the amount of human interaction involved as well as the importance of those interactions to successfully completing a transaction. Marketing in B2B settings is becoming increasingly powerful and central to corporate management, yet I see time and time again marketing departments trying to implement programs that look much more like B2C techniques, which mostly miss the interactive aspect of B2B sales. Whether it’s spamming the client base to death, or building simplistic “sales process” models, I’ve found that there is a huge gap in the perspectives between marketing folks and sales folks in B2B settings.

Let me dwell on the issue of ‘sales process’ for a moment, to illustrate my larger point. Those of you who have actually used a realistic sales process like TAS or Rick Page or Strategic Selling by Miller Heiman know that they all have one thing in common; they are tools for sales and sales management, not for marketing. It seems to me, given what is revealed in account and opportunity reviews time and time again, that marketing if wants to be effective, it should fundamentally be focusing on assisting sales to win hearts and minds, but in my experience, marketing has grown increasingly disconnected from the sales view of the world, and I don’t think many companies are the better for it. At the same time, over the past 20+ years in the technology business (where I’ve spent my career) it seems that marketing has increased in importance dramatically, while the entire enterprise of selling has been diminished, relegated conceptually to “execution” against some marketing plan. I think this mindset is dangerous for companies that want to stay close to their customers and also get good returns from the resources spent to acquire customers. It’s also a major source of conflict that many companies currently experience between marketing and sales.

I started selling technology to businesses in 1984, and when I came into the business, most companies had a unified SVP of Sales and Marketing who invariably possessed significant direct sales experience. The marketing department itself was liberally sprinkled with sales people who’d been promoted or made lateral moves into marketing roles (in fact marketing used to be a career path for sales people and vice versa). Back then, the big conflict was between marketing and engineering – rather than with sales. Software and hardware companies often created useful products wholly out of the inventive minds of software engineers, and those engineers were reluctant to give over control to marketing types,  having created the product in the first place. Product marketing was increasing in importance, having been borrowed from the likes of P&G, and imposing this kind of planning and rational discipline on new product development was a food fight in the corporate boardroom. In most companies, marketing was seen as inexplicably related to sales in B2B environments, rather than as a completely separate department. Not today. Marketing has become independent, and many a marketeer sees themselves as responsible for improving the sales process, in addition to driving leads, pricing, value proposition etc. Today, because of marketings access to the executive suite with respect to strategy and analysis, sales is continuously competing with marketing’s vision of the world, and much friction can result. I do have to say that I know I’m biased as a salesperson, but I’ve also seen this pattern in dozens of organizations. I’ll try to stay evenhanded – let me know how I do!

It’s also worth noting that in the “good old days”, sales was highly respected, sometimes even feared in most organizations. A sales person with an IT problem went to the top of the stack to be fixed. Administrative assistance was available to generate high quality proposals. Support teams knew that they answered to sales. Before I was thirty, I had run two cross functional teams of ten or more people for large accounts or opportunities. These teams included pre-sales support, engineering, marketing types and consultants. There was no question who was in charge – I was. Btw, also received formal training in “Cross-Functional Team Leadership”, as it was accepted that I needed to be skillful in managing the ad hoc groups that formed for particular projects. I was empowered to serve my customers; in fact I was seen as the person who brought it all together for the customer.

Todays salesperson, in most cases, finds themselves in a far different environment. Between inside sales, account managers, project managers or marketing, I found myself constantly evaluated and second guessed by people who had never carried a personal sales quota in their lives, mostly while receiving sub-par support from those same organizations. Whether it was terrible pre-packaged “corporate pitches” and/or product demonstrations, absent or lacking competitive analysis, or a lack of leads, I found myself rarely helped and many times held back by marketing in particular. On the rare occasion that I might bring up what seemed terribly obvious about how useful a new “tool” was for me, I was usually greeted with anger and defensiveness. If I dared say “truthfully, I’d never use this presentation with a customer” I was seen as the problem, not the marketeer who developed the deck. I don’t want to be melodramatic, but in my eyes the conflicting views of reality between sales and marketing in B2B settings isvery real and cause very real breakdowns in creating a successful sales and marketing operation. These days, marketing seems to see it’s fate as much less inextricably tied to sales success in how it operates; at least that’s how it feels to me.

Today’s rallying cry from marketing is all about “data” and “processes”, all while continuously seeking to reduce a very complex set of interactions that make up the average B2B sales campaign to a few attributes of data and a flow chart. I constantly see an emphasis on analysis of the pipeline and forecast, with marketing folks at the head of the line, measuring “lead gen” and “conversion” – as though these things are “stages” that a prospective customer moves through magically, versus recognizging that they are being led through them by a skilled sales executive. Let me put it another way, I find myself constantly having conversations with marketing folks and others about “lead gen” who’ve never actually generated a lead in their lives. I started out in this business going door to door in twenty square blocks of downtown Manhattan selling word processors. I had to go out and win hearts and minds – face to face, in a moment or two sometimes. I’ve made tens of thousands of phone cold calls and have worked countless tradeshows and events where I’ve personally pitched thousands of people, trying to find leads. And yet, I have to listen to people tell me about lead conversion who’ve never had a territory, have never had to generate their own leads and living off of what they generated. It’s not that it frustrates me – although it does -it’s that it’s not productive. It doesn’t help me close more business when I have to deal with people who don’t really understand what it is I do within my own company who are supposed to support me. The plain fact, from my experience, is that most B2B marketing folks don’t really understand B2B buying/selling behavior well enough. I think that any marketing manager or person with significant responsibility in a B2B setting should have direct B2B sales experience. Today, most of them don’t, and I think that this lack of comprehension about what actually drives B2B buyers is at the core of the disconnect between sales and marketing in many B2B companies.

So what is my point? I know you’re drowning in this sea of nonsense, and I know I’m telling you about the water you’re drowning in versus helping. My point is that you must help yourself. There is no cavalry coming. In fact, I think it’s only getting worse. You need to become the Chief Marketing and Sales Officer in your territory. You need to develop your own Territory Strategy and your own marketing projects for your region and territory. Also, rather than detaching from your organizations, you need to engage with it. While you’re out there selling, remember, these busy little beavers are meeting back in headquarters, cooking up the next idea that has no connection with reality; you let yourselves be absent at your peril. If you are an executive leading your company, I ask you, do you think it’s wise to have marketing and sales led separately? Do you think that your organization might benefit from unified Sales and Marketing leadership? Should you really take sales advice from folks who’ve never sold a thing in their lives?

I realize that it’s easy to write this article off as trashing marketing, but I’m not out to do that. Rather, what I’ve found is that marketing folks who actually possess some significant B2B sales knowledge, usually through experience in sales, are much more helpful and we should think about how to teach them what’s what. I try to take them out on sales calls whenever possible, which they are usually very willing to do, and is also typically humbling for them. We should stand up and criticize those programs and deliverables from marketing that don’t help the sales process, and in fact, we should direct marketing to a much greater degree to deliver support to sales that will actually make a difference. I say engage with marketing, don’t ignore them, but do so substantively and constructively. When sales and marketing are unified, they can be very powerful, but sales people aren’t even at the table in most marketing discussions these days. This needs to change, and changing sales behavior towards marketing is the only aspect of it that we control, so let’s improve how we do so.