Healing the Rift Between Sales & Marketing

How to Bring Both Sides Together to Act As One Team

It’s a tale as old as time, the sales team laments poor quality leads, the marketing team laments lack of insights or action from sales. Both teams complain about each other to upper management — and the rift only grows with time.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked in a company where sales and marketing were on the same page from the very beginning.

On the upside, that’s given me plenty of experience in seeing how to bring these teams together — what works and what doesn’t work.

In my experience, there are two key ingredients to bringing these teams together: having joint goals and regular communication.

Sounds so simple, right?

Yet, somehow it always boils down to these two topics. When they don’t exist, the teams are moving in different directions and can’t seem to find common ground. When implemented correctly, teams come together and find a newfound appreciation for each others’ work.

One thing to keep in mind — this change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s akin to a cultural change and a best-case scenario sees this taking around two years to really start taking hold.

How we initiated change at Bachem

I joined Bachem over three years ago, and it was a classic case of a commercial department which consisted of sales versus marketing.

A bit of background before we dive in: We’re a B2B in the pharmaceutical industry and our focus in marketing the last few years has centered around driving brand awareness and lead generation. The sales team on the other hand, has been undergoing a transformation and split into an existing sales organization (focused on upselling / maintaining business) and a BD organization (focused on hunting new business).

Regular communication

At the time I joined, there was little communication towards the departments — there was no all-hands sales & marketing meeting, no understanding of each others’ roles, and we even worked from a different building in our HQ in Switzerland. This meant even though we worked from the same site — we didn’t know each others’ faces and names (apart from when they popped up on MS teams).

Our new VP of marketing recognized the key ingredients were missing when she joined and immediately got to work. She implemented regional meetings between sales & marketing in the US, Europe & Asia. Every month we started to come together to interact with the local sales & marketing leaders.

What worked about this:

• It started to create a regular meeting cadence which meant we slowly got to know our peers in the sales & marketing leadership

What didn’t work about this:

• As the meetings were with the local leaders, many times this information did not make it’s way to their teams on the ground
• Local teams would often repeat the same issues that were affecting a group of products — rather than local issues. So for those in multiple alignments, it was repetitive
• As this meeting series was “pushed by marketing” it therefore didn’t get the same level of buy in from sales. For the first year, it was heavy with marketing updates and scarce with sales updates

Nevertheless, this improved over time and one of the main reasons is we changed the structure from a local alignment meeting based off of the regions to a product-structured meeting where sales & marketing leaders focused on a particular group of products could align on the things most relevant to them.

We also opened it up to all sales team members, and as soon as the regular sales team members, as opposed to just sales leadership, started to join the meeting — they were amazed at all the information marketing had been providing (and which simply had not made it to them).

Over time, as trust started to develop, sales became more open and now we have really interesting discussions in these meetings and are able to act on joint initiatives.

The most energizing part is where we talk about the upcoming month and all the sales and marketing activities taking place. We both understand the short-term priorities and ongoing projects that the other team is working on.

A physical meeting space

Something else that really helped our communication was working from the same building. No, don’t worry, I’m not a fan of being on-site all the time. I believe remote work is just as productive (and sometimes more so). But, when it comes to making connections and building trust I do believe having some facetime is important.

The simple fact of us moving into the same building created moments where we worked side-by-side and could overhear each others’ problems, we could occassionally have lunch together or a short chat.

What worked about this:

• Conflicts were minimized (or at least not escalated) as small topics could be discussed informally at each others’ desks
• Overhearing each others’ conversations generated an understanding of what both teams’ daily lives were like and what challenges they were facing

What didn’t work about this:

• Many times the teams still worked from separate floors — this created some silos within the building as depending on where you sat you could get more or less information

I can tell you — in the beginning, the marketing team was not thrilled about having to pack up and move everything to another (older, hotter) office building. And, quickly frankly the sales team was not enthralled with the idea of having to share with us either.

Nevertheless, more shared understanding developed and those small, personal connections absolutely play a role in better cross-functional collaboration.

Now, if you’re a remote worker or in a remote-first company — don’t fret! Just having a bit of shared facetime per quarter where you are actually working side-by-side (not just doing a quarterly workshop) can achieve this. You need to experience a bit of just normal working time together to develop an understanding of how someone else ticks.

Back to Bachem, we now had these regular calls and just saw our colleagues more often. We also pushed our upper management to the point that we finally have a quarterly sales & marketing townhall — so now it’s not just peer-driven initiatives like our alignment calls, but it’s actually starting to come a bit more top-down. These townhalls always have a networking element afterwards, which once again facilitates a bit more connection between the team members.

Joint goals

Of course, regular communication in itself is not enough to heal a sales and marketing rift. Arguably the more important piece is having joint goals.

Think about it: without joint goals, and a clear direction from the company or at least department, these teams are naturally going to go in different directions.

Marketing is typically thinking more long-term. Of course, we care about this month’s campaigns, but we’re analyzing it from the perspective of how can we improve this further next time, and how can we create long-term brand awareness and target leads today that require nurturing to become the customers of tomorrow. We recognize that many of our efforts can take time to deliver results.

Sales teams, on the other hand, are typically focused on making the current quarterly or annual targets. They are targeting that commission and want to close deals quickly to be able to move on to the next one.

If a company wants both to meet in the middle — it has to incentivize that. It has to reward a marketer who thinks also short-term to partner with a sales team member on a specific key account. It has to reward a sales team member who uses the correct branding on a customer presentation because that will influence long-term brand perception.

If a company doesn’t incentivize them, then when sales and marketing team members ask WIIFM (what’s in it for me) — the answer will be, well, not a lot, at least directly.

Having joint goals is the first step. This was one of our first errors at Bachem. I was initially laser focused on driving online lead generation. My personal goals were tied to metrics like a number of MQL (marketing-qualified leads) from a particular channel.

Yet, my colleagues in the sales department were in the middle of a transformation splitting off the BD group. They weren’t ready for this quantity of leads. They were focused on simply transferring proposal writing to project management so they could do some hunting.

So, what happened?

Well I achieved my goals with flying colors, we well surpassed the number of MQLs.

And, the sales guys?

Well, they made their goals too — they successfully transferred over a big portion of the proposal writing.

The result for our collaboration?

Mutual frustration.

Marketing generated amazing leads that needed action — but I wasn’t able to immediately prove that my team was generating closed business — as quite frankly there hadn’t been much closed business — it was mostly in progress.

And the sales guys wanted to be out there hunting, but they were focused on transferring admin work. So they saw a huge number of leads coming in every week, and felt increasingly overwhelmed and sad that they couldn’t act on this.

What I learned from this is joint goals from sales & marketing are absolutely essential. We had heard that the sales team was ready to go out and hunt, needing new leads, but actually their priorities in the system were about something totally different which would have influenced the activities we did from marketing. They would have been ready for our lead generation efforts only a year later down the line.

What worked about this:

• We knew what each team was focusing on in a vague way from our alignments. So at least we knew where each other wanted to get to

What didn’t work about this:

• We weren’t clear enough with how the particular incremental steps looked — so we knew the big picture but we weren’t on the same page about the current focus

What could an example of a joint goal be in this case? Well, we could have come together to say: we want to be able to be 100% focused on hunting new business by X date.

As a marketing team, we could have spent more time setting up the campaigns to be ready to launch ahead of that date, and put our energy more into awareness initiatives rather than lead generation in the interim.

We could have agreed what it means to be 100% focused on hunting leads. How many leads are we talking? In which product areas? By what time exactly? Should they be fresh or have some nurturing at that point?

Looking back, all of these questions could have been addressed if we would have taken the time to really work together towards a joint objective and all had shared understanding of what the tangible metrics should be.

Shared understanding

In addition to having clearly joint goals — I believe a shared understanding of goals in general is also crucial.

For example, from marketing, we develop our goals starting with strategic drivers, breaking that down into top-level department and then group goals, and personal goals.

Our team has spent the last few years training the leaders and team on an understanding of what good goals look like, and how to clearly and tangibly measure the impact (I myself am a huge fan of OKRs).

However, when our sales team shares their annual goals in our alignment meetings— they don’t have this understanding and focus more on what projects and tasks they would be doing.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s also really useful information — but it’s not focused on goals and what we’re driving towards. So we were speaking different languages.

What we did to overcome this was to work with senior sales & marketing leadership to have shared commercial goals at the very top before the goal setting process began.

In past years, the goal has only been a revenue target — which is good as a health metric and to leave room for empowerment, but doesn’t exactly provide a guiding star for the teams to move jointly towards.

This year, before we had our department share their goals for the year, I drafted some commercial goals for the department which our VP could give to our department head to use as guidance.

What I hope you takeaway from that is that even if your company doesn’t provide as clear strategic direction as you would like, you can still influence the creation of strategy.

To be honest, our sales team was a bit against the idea of having shared goals. They liked their autonomy and wanted to remain more flexible to change. It would have been another few years to get them to come around, so the better tactic was to have this particular change — joint goals and a shared understanding of them — coming from top-down.

We’re three years into this change now— what have the results been?

Our sales and marketing teams have a better understanding of what each other is doing, what is currently on the table both in the short-term in the upcoming month, and in the mid-to-long-term with the joint goals.

There is more communication and the teams actually know each other and who is working on what. If not specific customers, at least what group of customers, products, etc.

We’ve finally started to stop this tug of war where it feels like we’re working despite each other to accomplish things. Now we are actually more like one team moving in the same direction. It’s honestly refreshing.

Has the rift completely healed? I’d be lying if I said it had — we’re still on this healing journey but I know we’re getting there.

The times when I notice the most how far we’ve come is when we have new employees. There is now a joint sales and marketing onboarding process, so from the very beginning they are together as one team in the same training and all sales and marketing groups come for a short introduction. So from day one it’s no longer “us versus them”, it’s just “us”.

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