Put Sales and Marketing as ONE in Your Org, Why and How

Image Credit: cerasis

Posted by: Albert Weng

Dividing functional job is an outdated discipline, both in academic and workplace, we need more "integrated collaboration" to a joint force of the ever challenging marketplace. And this is the greatest thing in human life, because that's the way a human being originally is, here's why.

Notice: There're two major categories of marketing functions in an organization, the corporate marketing, and business marketing. The marketing I refer to here is the latter one, the business marketing.

Factory-like Organizational Design in a Business Unit

In organization design, the structure is divided by departmental functions, pretty much like what a factory was built in the early days. Mainly because the focus is on the operation of a factory. However, we have less factory's operation as the major competitive advantage, but keen for a much customer engaged organization that could touch, sense and engage with the customer in a greater way that sustain and extend the business. Therefore, dividing function is out (dated), integrated function is the only way to drive the business preferably.

Sales & Marketing is One Unit, Not TWO

How often you see the sales department and marketing department were set up in two units? In most of the organizations are doing so after the so-called startup stage. Why? They consider they've scaled up and need specialization in their organizational structure. Also, they may have more "executives" that need a bigger title to compensate? Wait a minute, the fundamental function of sales is to generate revenue (making money), and of marketing is to execute the budget (spending money), try to think like the owner (boss) of the company, if these two forces don't join together seamlessly on how each penny was spent on the activity to generate the expected return, isn't it a kind of stupid, or fooling someone/ something?

How to Make Sales & Marketing Working as ONE

A few quick advises, and would love to have your feedback.

1. Transparency

Openly discuss the sales plan and marketing plan, and try making a connection for conversion rate.

2. Hire a Salesperson for Marketing Head, Vice Versa

Marketing is a kind of specialty, the PR, art design, marcom are a kind, but definitely not the head of marketing. Therefore, hire someone with solid sales experience to head up the marketing department could enjoy a better protocol in communicating the conversion from marketing to sales.

3. Turn Marketing into Sales Force

When you then know to run the marketing more associated to sales, it's better to make it part of the sales force, but not a supporting function to a sales force. This also mean, the sales head shall be able to manage and develop the marketing effort to help sales/ business directly. Did you find it difficult to have a sales head to run also the marketing job well? Well, all the sales head shall advance themselves to be a business head, which cover also marketing nowadays, since the competition and demand change every day, the smaller the decision making circle, the better the response time and thus the advancement made. Try to train and change your sales head with another head on marketing, otherwise, try to hire one with both.

In a new era of social media for almost everything, the more info the customer accessed, the more challenge a business shall be able to manage and respond quickly and correctly. Less functional deployment will ease the receiving and understanding circle, then speed up the strategy formulation and its response circle from the decision making. Did I say that we need a new type of professional that could run more things than in the past, YES.