Chapter 2

Sales and Marketing Don’t Always Get Along

The Sales–Marketing Interface is the Key to Strategic Success

As we discussed in the previous chapter, customers in today’s connected and hypercompetitive marketplace do not look to their sellers’ sales and marketing personnel to simply deliver new products and services. Instead, they expect these customer-facing employees to co-create and deliver a differentiated, sustainable value proposition that addresses the core problems they are dealing with in getting a specific job done. Over the years, the roles of sales and marketing personnel have changed. Today’s sales and marketing personnel are increasingly expected to participate in strategic and operational activities, respectively; a far cry from their conventional roles. Consequently, sales and marketing’s contributions to value development, deployment, and communication have undergone a metamorphosis.

Because of their direct relationships to customers, in most companies it falls upon marketing and sales to develop and implement winning marketing strategies that provide superior customer value. It is therefore no surprise that the nature of interaction between sales and marketing can make or break the company’s strategy-making process and determine its eventual success or failure in the marketplace.¹

In this chapter, we present three vignettes of how real-life sales–marketing interactions impact a company’s strategy development. While we have changed the company and executives’ names, these vignettes are based on our research within real companies, large and small, across the globe. Unfortunately, each story fails to provide a happy ending and concludes with missed sales targets, haphazard strategy implementation, or outright strategy failure. We follow each vignette with an analysis of what went wrong, which highlights specific areas within the strategy-making process where the interaction between sales and marketing personnel failed to deliver. These stories serve as an introduction and reference points for the larger discussion that we present in this and the following chapters.

Vignette 1: Flawed Groundwork

Aarin is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) within the cardiac care division of Dynamic Inc., a US$3.5 billion multinational medical technology company in the healthcare industry. Aarin’s division brings in revenues worth US$700 million per year, approximately 20 percent of the total company sales, and also makes a significant contribution to the company’s overall bottom line. It is an understatement to say that his division’s performance is watched closely by corporate leadership.

Aarin has been working for Dynamic for the past 15 years and now leads a team of nine brand managers, each looking after several brand franchises. His marketing team prides itself in being analytical and meticulous. They spend a lot of time analyzing market data, competitive activity, and other environmental factors as they develop their marketing strategies. In other words, they do extensive homework prior to strategy development.

It is October 15, 2013, and Aarin and his team are gearing up to prepare the marketing plans for 2014. As is their usual practice, they have collated sales figures from across the country and performed an in-depth analysis of the sales trends. In addition, they have extensively analyzed the activities of their three key competitors over the past six quarters and feel that they have developed a good understanding of their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as of how things are likely to unfold next year from a competitive standpoint. After spending many long hours working with all the market and competitive data, Aarin’s team has come up with a new marketing strategy that they intend to launch during the next sales meeting.

Sally is the Chief Sales Officer for the cardiac care division within Dynamic Inc., and she leads a team of 75 salespeople. Sally is Aarin’s counterpart in the division. While Aarin and his team were developing the new marketing strategy for 2014, Sally also asked her sales colleagues to begin preparing for the upcoming new business year. As a part of this preparation, Sally’s sales team performed an exhaustive analysis of their individual sales territories and identified areas of strengths as well as key concerns. They also looked at the competitors in their respective markets, assessed their strengths and weaknesses, and tried to arrive at informed judgments about what competitive activities to expect in their territories next year. At the end of this 2-month period of collecting and analyzing field data, Sally felt that her team had done a good job of analyzing the status quo and they were confident about starting the new year.

Thus, both the marketing and sales teams were confident that they had done a thorough job prior to launching the new strategy. But something was amiss, which they did not have on their radar at that point.

Fast forward to April 2014: Things are not looking well. In spite of having a brand new strategy and a well-thought-out marketing plan, the division missed its sales targets for the first quarter of 2014. To make matters worse, there are strong indications that sales are not going to improve significantly in the next 3 to 6 months. Overall, the mood within the sales and marketing teams is one of disappointment, frustration, and confusion; a glaring contrast to the exuberance and confidence that these teams displayed just 4 to 5 months ago when they were doing their homework for the new strategy. An overly concerned Aarin calls for a meeting with Sally to assess what’s happening in the marketplace and why the strategy is not working. Aarin is determined to get to bottom of the problem and understand what went wrong.

What Went Wrong?

At the end of their 3-hour meeting, the following picture emerges: The very process that Aarin and Sally followed to develop the new divisional strategy is fundamentally flawed, which resulted in an ineffective strategy. This process can be traced to Dynamic’s philosophy and an overriding belief (especially prevalent within all the marketing teams across multiple divisions of Dynamic) that strategy development is the exclusive domain of marketing. As a result, salespeople were never a part of the broader conversation about marketing strategy; especially during the early stages, when the nuts and bolts of the strategy were put in place. Excluding sales personnel from this key activity resulted in marketing strategies that were based on a weak foundation. Because the division’s market environment was relatively stable during the last decade, these weak strategies still managed to deliver results. But now that the market had shifted, things went south, which helped uncover this major flaw in the company’s strategy-development process.

Determined to identify the micro-level processes that collectively resulted in this sub-optimal process, Aarin and Sally began to dig deeper. What they found astounded them. They found a systematic lack of two-way communication between sales and marketing, which had a strong impact on the initial stages of strategy development. While Aarin and Sally prepared really well for the new strategy, they operated independently from each other. During their market and competitive data gathering stages, neither the marketing or sales leadership, nor their rank and file made any active effort to share their data with the counterpart function or to understand each other’s reading of the market. They also realized that neither party was enthusiastic about sharing their ideas or seeking or giving frank feedback from and to their counterparts, which further deteriorated the strategy-development process.

The limited communication that did occur between the two functions, especially during the strategy development stages, was formal, sporadic and lacked any “conversational” feel. It was an arm’s length communication that occurred mostly through formal channels, and only because it was mandated. For example, during the last quarter of 2013, when strategies for the upcoming year were being developed, salespeople simply filled out sales-call reports and sent them to headquarters, as they always did. They did not make any extra effort to share their market perspectives, or important changes, big and small, they had noticed in their respective market, with their marketing colleagues. The marketers, on their part, stayed in touch with salespeople through periodic e-newsletters, highlighting the monthly sales figures and success stories. But they, too, failed to actively reach out to and engage with salespeople to seek their input on future strategies. On the rare occasion that sales and marketing found themselves at the same table discussing something, they typically spoke past each other and did not stop to listen to what the other party tried to say.

A lack of effective feedback mechanism between sales and marketing at this stage in the strategy-development process left both parties with only a limited understanding of market realities. Marketing did not appreciate the ground-level realities of individual customers, while sales lacked a good perspective on broader market trends, the things that they did not see in their individual sales regions. Even worse, both parties “did not know what they did not know.” Moreover, in the cardiac care division it just never occurred that sales and marketing would come together to jointly analyze market feedback and make sense of what happened in the marketplace, prior to diving into the strategy development activity. There were no processes that combined sales’ and marketing’s different perspectives about how to read market signals. This dysfunctional communication between sales and marketing left the company bereft of the richness of interpretations that results in solid, joint insights about what is going on in the market and how the company may best strategize for it.

During their analysis, Aarin and Sally further realized that the lack of mutual consulting and a conversational approach between sales and marketing continued even when the strategy was being finalized. Marketers thought of themselves as the “owners of marketing strategy” and did not make any effort to test their key strategic activities within some sales territories. Even a simple idea such as letting a select few salespeople in on their plans and asking them to test-drive the key elements of the new marketing strategy, did not cross the marketers’ minds. Since the plan that marketing came up with did not really go through any review by their sales colleagues, the ideas and activities were not vetted and no tweaks were suggested or incorporated. Ironically, at the stage of the strategy-development process where the plan should be most open to ideas and modifications, it was cast in concrete and the processes that marketing personnel followed made it almost impervious to outside ideas and suggestions—especially from the sales organization.

Importance of Solid Groundwork

This vignette reveals that sales and marketing personnel did a poor job of laying a strong foundation for an effective marketing strategy. There was a lack of two-way communication between sales and marketing as marketing personnel were putting together the nuts and bolts of marketing strategy; that is, when the groundwork for the new strategy was being performed.

While it may sound obvious that marketing and sales must engage in a constant dialog during the initial stages of strategy development, the reality in many companies is a lack of communication between sales and marketing during this stage. This robs the interface of the opportunity to have an unfiltered conversation about the concerns that each function may have about where the company is today and where it needs to go tomorrow. For example, salespeople do not have the opportunity to share their experiences with current marketing strategies with their marketing counterparts, and marketers, in turn, do not get a sales perspective on specific competitive activities they see in their respective sales territories.

For any B2B company, large or small, developing an effective marketing strategy requires both sales and marketing people to get together and collectively make sense of the information available to them. Having multiple minds use different perspectives, look at market information and make sense of it together results in a much richer understanding of the situation, which in turn leads to more effective marketing strategies. It is not surprising to see many companies lacking the open communication and mechanisms, such as weekly discussion sessions, that allow sales and marketing personnel to come together and perform an in-depth analysis of market information and the plans proposed by marketing. As a result, these companies are susceptible to what occurred at the cardiac care division within Dynamic: A one-sided development of marketing strategy, followed by a lack of collective analysis of its strength and weakness during the early stages.

While this vignette highlights the importance of extensive interaction between sales and marketing during the groundwork stage, the following story helps us realize that solid groundwork is a necessity, but insufficient for a successful strategy.

Vignette 2: Compromised Strategy Transfer

Aamilia is a marketing manager at Twin Cities Inc., a leading global food company that owns a number of industry leading brands. Aamilia manages a brand portfolio in the frozen foods division that is worth US$250 million, leads a team of ten brand managers and product executives, and reports to the CMO. Aamilia is excited about the upcoming quarterly sales meeting in April 2014. At this meeting, her team will launch two new products, on which it has worked with research and development (R&D) for more than 2 years. The new products are of great significance to Aamilia’s brand portfolio because a few other products within the portfolio are slowing down. She pins a great deal of hope on the new products to stem the tide.

Over the past few months, Aamilia had immersed herself fully in preparations for the two product launches. Her team has developed the following launch materials to be handed out to the sales force at the product launch meeting: (a) a comprehensive strategy document (her team calls it the Strategy Overview Essay) that outlines the major components of the new product strategy; (b) a PowerPoint presentation that will be used at the sales meeting to introduce the new products and outline their respective marketing strategies; (c) three pieces of marketing communication that the salespeople will use as they introduce the new products to their customers: a product information DVD, two white papers that substantiate the longer than average shelf life claim (100 days versus an average of 60 days) that Aamilia is making on the new products, and a promotional materials binder with printed communication materials aimed at different customer segments; and (d ) a website containing all product information that salespeople may need as they launch the products in the market. Reviewing the preparation that went into the product launch, Aamilia is proud of what her team has achieved. The new products are already in the warehouses, ready to be shipped to major grocery retailers at a moment’s notice. The marketing team has developed a sound strategy, and they have the launch and post-launch communication materials for salespeople ready. As she reflects on her previous product launches, she feels that her team had never been so ready. She is ready to roll and looks forward to enjoying the success of the new products.

Fast-forward 6 months. The mood in Aamilia’s team is anything but jubilant. She reviews the sales figures for the two product launches with her team and she is not happy. While the products were received reasonably well in the market, they have not sold anywhere near the numbers that she had hoped for. So far, the products have sold at about 60 percent of their targeted volume. Because of this, Aamilia and her marketing colleagues went to different sales territories on sales calls with multiple salespeople and compared notes. The insights gained from this exercise left her confused and frustrated. In spite of preparing detailed instructions and sales process outlines, salespeople in different regions had pitched the new products in different ways, highlighting different (sometimes obscure) product benefits to the grocery chain buyers. Aamilia feels that the sales organization failed to implement most suggestions provided to them in the strategy essay and other support materials that her team presented during the launch event. She also feels that the salespeople did not have a good grasp of the overall strategy in terms of target market selection and product positioning. In her field visits, she had not heard salespeople bring up even once the longer shelf-life of the product and substantiate it with the two white papers they have access to.

She experiences a mix of emotions: confusion, frustration, and at times, anger. In her eyes, achieving 60 percent of the targeted sales volume is tantamount to an outright strategy failure, something that she is not used to. As she reflects on what went wrong, she thinks back on how they developed the new products and crafted the launch strategy. She clearly remembers that she took the precaution to let the sales leadership in on most of her key strategic decisions during (a) the new product development process and (b) the strategy development process. This ensured that several crucial pre-launch decisions she made had the “blessings” of sales leadership. In addition, she was promised by the sales leadership that they would whole-heartedly support these new products in front of their rank and file.

Aamilia cannot help but wonder: If the products are good, the strategy is well-thought out and vetted by sales leadership, and if the sales leadership is publicly supportive of the new products initiative in front of the sales rank and file, what is the missing piece in this puzzle? To obtain detailed insights, she schedules hour-long phone calls with a couple of field sales managers—Aavel in the Midwest and Lotte on the East Coast. They are both bright individuals and she knows that they are being groomed for sales leadership positions in her company. Furthermore, she has developed a good personal and professional rapport with them over the past few years. She really wants to identify the fundamental flaw in the process and therefore asks Aavel and Lotte to provide her with unvarnished feedback on what they think went wrong. What she hears is nothing short of being astonishing and troubling.

What Went Wrong?

Both Aavel and Lotte explain to Aamilia how they view the 2-day sales/product launch meeting in April as a failed exercise. They are particularly critical of how the entire strategy was presented to the field force during that meeting. In a nutshell, what happened during the meeting was that Aamilia’s team presented the strategy and simply distributed the nice-looking strategy essay (with numerous charts and pictures in it) to the field personnel, with the expectation that salespeople would devote several hours during the evening to read it all. Aavel and Lotte also shared with Aamilia that, while the marketing team used the prepared 1-hour PowerPoint presentation to outline the new strategy, the team did not offer their sales colleagues any opportunity to ask questions. To the field personnel this was very frustrating. Because this was the first time that they saw the strategy in detail, it was unrealistic to expect them to digest all the information presented to them during the 1-hour strategy presentation.

Lotte mentioned that what happened after the presentation was even more frustrating to the salespeople within her team. After the morning presentation, Aamilia’s marketing team stayed around for half an hour, made some small talk with a few salespeople during the coffee break, and then left the sales meeting under the pretext that they had other engagements at the corporate office. As a result, there was no marketer present during the long afternoon sessions when salespeople, in their own groups, pored over the strategy essay and tried to understand the new plan of action that marketers had devised for them. Without the presence of a marketer to answer questions, it was left to the salespeople and their managers to translate the strategy ideas from the strategy essay into specific field activities. That is, to decide who must do what and when in the field to ensure that the new strategy is implemented successfully. For example, as part of the market penetration strategy called “switching”, the strategy essay emphasizes that each salesperson will try to encourage a switch within three accounts currently served by their competitors and bring them under their fold. Neither the essay nor the marketing team’s presentation provided any further details about the kinds of accounts (size, geography, end-user profile) salespeople are expected to target for switching. Also, no specific advice was given about how salespeople should initiate the switching conversations with potential targets and the steps that they should take along the way as they encouraged the switch from competitors’ products.

Aavel pointed out to Aamilia that because of the lack of input from her team members in this vital process of translating strategic ideas into specific sales activities, salespeople were left to their own wits to figure things out. He mentioned that as the sales meeting ended, and sales personnel prepared to leave town for their respective territories, the general feeling was one of overwhelming confusion. The salespeople were not at all confident that they knew which core strategic areas they needed to focus on, nor did they feel that a uniform tone was set by marketing about the new strategy. As a result, instead of being motivated and charged to go forward with the strategy, salespeople left the sales meeting confused, dejected, and frustrated.

Lotte concluded that Aamilia should not be surprised that the disparate activities, promotional messages, and product positioning that she witnessed in the field were haphazard, non-uniform, and only loosely related to the strategy. In her opinion, this was the direct result of salespeople not understanding the strategy at all. Lotte further mentioned that she had spoken to colleagues in other parts of the country and they told her in confidence that their field managers and salespeople were so confused about the strategy that they did not even come close to finalizing their field activities during the 2-day launch meeting. As Aamilia read between the lines, she realized that Aavel and Lotte were telling her that her team should feel lucky to have such a dedicated field force, which, despite the lack of coherent guidance, was able to achieve at least 60 percent of the targeted sales for the new products.

Importance of Optimal Strategy Transfer from Marketing to Sales

The preceding vignette and its analysis is bound to be familiar to some readers. It is unfortunate, yet very common, that marketers often assume that their job is to develop marketing strategy and then to simply hand it over to the field force. They may arrive at this conclusion since historically, in their companies, marketers view themselves as strategy creators and salespeople as strategy implementers. Moreover, in many companies, marketers contend that since they have spent so much time working out the details of a marketing strategy, the final plan is sound and self-explanatory. As a result, they expect their sales colleagues to just take the plan and run with it. The marketers’ mindset creates a domino effect: marketers develop fancy-looking strategy documents and fill them with numbers, charts, pictures, and marketing jargon that salespeople do not relate to or do not have time to ponder over. In addition, they literally hand-off the strategy to the sales force by giving a quick 1-hour, canned spiel that reproduces what is already written in the strategy document. During the presentation, they frequently mention how cutting-edge their strategy is and how it is up to the field force to ensure that their superb plan will be successful in the field. Unfortunately, these presentations sorely lack the discussion about the rationale behind the strategy and, most importantly, fail to explain how this new strategy will help the field force achieve their goals; in other words, what is in it for them?

There may be many reasons why marketers do not spend much time explaining their strategy to the field force. First, they simply do not realize how important it is. Second, they feel that it is beneath them to have extensive strategy discussions with salespeople who they view purely as field operators. Third, they believe that salespeople are unable to grasp the big, strategic ideas and hence, it is not worth the time and effort to dig deeper into the underlying rationale and analysis of how the strategy came about. Fourth, they do not want to enter an extended conversation about strategy details with salespeople and minutely dissect the strategy, because they are unwilling to hear any negative comments about the strategy, or make any last-minute changes to it.

No matter what the reason, as any sales professional will be quick to point out, this vignette describes exactly how not to handle the strategy transfer from marketing to sales. Fancy words in a marketing strategy document do not mean much to salespeople, unless they have been given sufficient opportunity by their marketing colleagues to dig through, think about, and have an open conversation about the meaning of those ideas and how they help them achieve their goals. Salespeople are as interested in activity details as they are in the big ideas, which means that it is critical that they understand the why and what of a strategy. They want to see how the fancy words (for example, switching) from the marketing strategy document translate into specific tactics and activities that they can perform in their respective territories. In other words, when a salesperson looks at a marketing strategy initiative presented by marketers, three thoughts come to their mind.

1.What does this new idea mean to my performance in my market? Where are the pointers that suggest that the new idea will be successful in my territory? Salespeople do not necessarily care about how beneficial the idea is at a macro-level, since all that matters to them is whether and how the idea will succeed in their microcosm.

2.If I am to work with this idea, how will my company help me achieve my goals? Salespeople want to understand whether and which marketing support systems will be in place as they initiate specific field activities that are consistent with the broader marketing plan. If they don’t see much evidence, they disengage.

3.How will the proposed new activities impact my day-to-day work? As soon as salespeople hear about a new strategy, they begin to assess the new tasks (such as calling on three new customers per month and trying to “switch” them) that they need to engage in to implement it, and the current tasks (visiting key existing customers once a quarter) that they have to give up to make room in their schedule for the new tasks. Salespeople look for direction in translating strategic ideas into action plans and finalizing field activities.

None of the above happened during product launch meetings at Twin Cities Inc. As a result, there was no in-depth conversation about the new strategy at the sales meeting and in the end, salespeople lacked knowledge of activity specifics, clear direction, and focus. This was reflected in the field in a wide variety of activities that did no justice to the strategy and failed to deliver.

The two vignettes seem to emphasize that as a marketing executive you need to: (1) engage extensively with your sales organization as you devise any new strategies and have their inputs and ideas woven through the strategy, and (2) spend enough time and effort on explaining the strategy and the underlying rationale to your field force, as well as work with them to translate the strategic ideas into specific, field-level action items. If you are a sales executive, you are probably thinking about how you can get involved in these two important strategic processes and work side-by-side with your marketing counterparts. But, as our next vignette illustrates, there is more to this.

Vignette 3: No Post-launch Commitment

Ron and Sandra, the CMO and General Manager Sales at National Inc., a world-class IT solutions company, share a remarkably close personal and professional rapport. Contrary to what we witness in many companies, they function very well as a team. They keep each other informed about their major strategic decisions, and frequently consult with one another before launching major marketing or sales initiatives.

It is March 2013 and Ron’s team is getting ready to launch a major marketing campaign on the West Coast, which accounts for over 55 percent of their division’s overall sales. It is a very important campaign and its success would lay a strong foundation for 2014 and beyond. Ron’s team has done a fabulous job of developing a sound marketing plan that is wholeheartedly supported by Sandra and her senior sales leadership. The new strategy entails upgrading key customers from their current IT infrastructure to a future-oriented one that allows them to migrate to cloud computing at 75 percent of the total cost of their competitors’ products. In other words, National would enable its customers to implement future-oriented, versatile technology at a whopping 25 percent discount on the upgrade price.

Ron’s team has done a great deal of homework before developing this strategy. Together with salespeople, they visited key customers to understand their perspectives. In addition, they extensively consulted with field personnel on the West Coast and gathered a lot of feedback from them about the kinds of strategies that seem to work in that market. The resulting campaign is the end product of meticulous planning and extensive joint groundwork on the part of both the sales and marketing teams. As Ron applies the finishing touches to the campaign, he feels very strongly about its potential financial upside as well as how prepared his team is to offer all the required support to their sales personnel for this campaign.

The campaign launches with much fanfare during the December 2013 annual sales meeting. At this meeting, both the sales and marketing leadership spend much time with the West Coast sales team (90 salespeople, 6 field managers, and 2 sales managers) explaining the strategy details and the rationale behind the strategy, as well as what the specific strategy activities entail. Given the importance of this new campaign, Ron instructs his marketing team to stay put with their sales colleagues throughout the 3-day meeting as they examine the strategy and get acquainted with its tactical nuances. His team is ready to answer any questions that may come up, and assist salespeople in developing action plans for their individual markets. His team is very diligent and they put a lot of effort into the sales meeting to ensure that salespeople have a very clear idea about which specific activities are expected from them during the next 6 months as they take the strategy to market. When asked, salespeople mention that they are excited about this new strategy and feel that they are ready to take the market by storm. Overall, at the end of the sales meeting, it looks like the field force is poised to make a big strike and the mood is enthusiastic.

Unfortunately, the reality turns out to be much less exciting. It is early April of 2014 and the mood in the marketing and sales teams is far from jubilant and confident. The excitement that existed at the end of the December sales meeting has completely evaporated. In spite of all the research and planning that went into creating the campaign, it failed to make a noticeable impact in four major markets on the West Coast: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Barring a few, sporadic success stories, customers are not at all enthusiastic about the new offering; even at the 25 percent price discount. The field force feels frustrated and is desperately looking for guidance.

As it happens, the bad news takes a while to make it to the top. While Ron and Sandra had heard some less positive feedback through the grapevine in the first 4 weeks after the campaign was launched, they did not anticipate the extent to which the campaign failed. The first quarter sales numbers caught them completely off-guard. To understand what happened, they set out to investigate this failure jointly. They make multiple phone calls, go on customer visits themselves, and speak with a large number of sales personnel on the West Coast. Their findings prove to be both surprising and disheartening.

What Went Wrong?

More than halfway through their investigation, Ron and Sandra notice a few common themes emerging that point to what went wrong. It turns out that the mid-level marketing executives within National Inc., especially the brand managers, believed that their responsibility for the specific marketing strategy ended after having spent a considerable time developing a fine marketing strategy, helping sales personnel to put the strategy into perspective, and aiding them in developing an activity plan. As a result, they expected the strategy to gain sufficient momentum going forward and therefore diverted their attention to other areas. Unfortunately, the reality, as it unfolded in the West Coast markets, was very different. As salespeople experienced to their great surprise when they took the campaign to their major customers, these customers were less than excited about the company’s proposal. Many customers said they were satisfied with their current IT infrastructure and viewed National’s new offer not as an opportunity to upgrade at a significant price discount, but rather as an effort by the market leader to force them to upgrade and in the process extract additional revenue. Within the first 3 weeks of launching the strategy, salespeople were hitting a major, unexpected obstacle: resistant and belligerent customers who saw no value in National’s offering!

As salespeople turned to their marketing colleagues for ideas and answers, they did not find the support they expected and needed. The marketers assumed that their responsibility had ended and they had moved on to the next big thing. Not surprisingly then, marketers did not invest much time into examining what was happening in the field with their strategy. The salespeople had a hard time connecting with their marketing colleagues and were in a very tricky situation. On the one hand, they faced nonresponsive and resistant customers, and on the other hand, they did not find the marketing support required to turn these customers around. This lack of follow-up on the marketers’ part proved especially deleterious since salespeople were left to fend for themselves in hostile waters. The negative feedback from customers to the strategy that had been carefully crafted and launched was not heard by marketers. Therefore, marketers did not respond to salespeople’s questions and concerns, or fine-tune their strategies in response to customer reactions in real time. The well-laid out strategy that everyone in the field was excited about, failed in the marketplace because marketers were unable to handle the post-launch strategy dynamics in a timely manner.

Staying in Touch After Launch

What Ron and Sandy learned from their analysis is all too familiar; especially to readers in the sales profession. It is not difficult to find marketers who believe that once the strategy that is blessed by both sales and marketing leadership is handed off to the field force, their job is over. These marketers do a great deal of homework, develop great campaigns, get their salespeople all excited about it, only to witness a few months down the line that their campaign is a failure.

One of the major causes of such an outcome involves, as some salespeople put it, “marketing’s unexpected U-turn.” That is, the very marketers that are omnipresent and available for conversations with salespeople while developing marketing strategies and helping field personnel with their launch preparations, are difficult to reach after the strategy has been launched. Even when salespeople are able to connect with them, it is difficult to get the support they need. Many salespeople feel that the marketers have suddenly lost interest in the strategy and are not really willing to help them out.

It is ironical that marketers, knowingly or unknowingly, distance themselves from the strategy process at a very crucial stage: the post-launch implementation stage. Although the nature of interaction between marketing and sales may change during the post-launch stage, marketers need to remain deeply involved. Marketers must lead from behind by offering their sales organization all the support they need. When this support is not provided, it disrupts the powerful feedback mechanism between the company’s headquarters and its field organization. As a result, word about whether or not the strategy works, fails to reach marketers in time. When strategies do work in the field, lack of such feedback prevents salespeople from achieving even higher milestones. When strategies do not work, the absence of robust feedback may prove lethal. In such cases, companies are unable to tweak their strategies in response to market realities, thereby rendering all the hard work done till this point to no avail. In contrast, when marketing does stay involved during the post-launch stage, salespeople receive optimal support and strategies are implemented consistently across territories. That this ideal situation turns out to be the exception, is caused by several factors:

•Marketers strongly believe in the notion of “hand-off ” : Once the strategy is handed off to the field force, it is the sales force’s responsibility to see it through

•Marketers have such faith in their strategy that they believe there will be no obstacles that require intervention on their part

•Marketers fail to realize that they need to stay in touch with sales personnel; to check-in periodically to assess how things are going

•Marketers feel that the sales force perceives their checking-in as “unnecessary meddling” and therefore they stay away

•Marketers are too busy with some new activity and cannot devote time to an ongoing campaign.

The Elements of an Optimal Marketing Strategy Process

An extremely disheartening, yet real fact is that a large number of marketing strategies fail to deliver results. The three vignettes discussed in this chapter corroborate this sobering reality by highlighting how a series of failures within the sales-marketing interface may lead to strategy failure. As we dig deeper into each of the three stories, what emerges is that in each story the failure of marketing strategy can be traced to some specific elements within the sales-marketing interface. Taken together, these three vignettes suggest that, irrespective of the industry or company, an optimal marketing strategy-making process encompasses three key stages.

Stage 1: Lay the Groundwork

Performing this stage optimally lays a strong foundation for the strategy. During this stage, many conversations take place within the company about the key elements of the new strategy, their advantages, and potential vulnerabilities. As companies begin to draft the new strategy, they analyze their current market performance and discuss a variety of big and small ideas that help them in addressing major concern areas and capitalizing on potential market opportunities.

Stage 2: Transfer from Marketing to Sales

The second stage brings the marketing team and the entire sales force together for the first time in the strategy process. During this stage, marketing personnel unveil the new strategy to the field force. Strategic ideas and philosophies are translated into ground-level realities; that is, strategic directives are translated into sales action plans that salespeople can implement in the field.

Stage 3: Follow-up

The third and final stage begins as soon as salespeople have taken the strategy to the field and begun the implementation process. This stage also includes the initial few weeks or months in the life of the new strategy as it makes its way through the market and experiences a response that may vary from overwhelming acceptance to tentative acceptance, indifference and resistance, or outright rejection.

In Table 2.1 we offer a brief discussion of each of the stages, and identify critical success factors that interface personnel may keep in mind to successfully execute each stage.

Before concluding this chapter, we want to note that although our preceding discussion presents the strategy-making process as consisting of three distinct stages, in reality, the demarcation lines between the stages may be blurry. In addition, when implementing this three-stage framework, you may find yourself going back and forth between stages at various points in time. Strategy-making is a complex, iterative process. As you are outlining the strategy, and specific objections come up from the field force, you may find yourself going back to the market data and re-evaluating your interpretations of the data; as if you are still in the groundwork stage. This is very common and no cause for alarm. In addition, strategy making is a cumulative process. The eventual strategic success depends on the seamless execution of each of the three stages. Any weak link in this process will have a negative effect on the entire strategy-making process as well as the eventual strategy implementation success.

Table 2.1 How marketing and sales may contribute to successful strategy making

Remember that the interactions between sales and marketing within a company have both short- and long-term consequences. In the short term, the nature of interaction dictates whether sales and marketing teams can get their jobs done on a day-to-day basis. In the long term, they determine whether the company is able to successfully develop and implement marketing strategies that allow them to develop and deliver superior customer value to customers.

In an ideal world, the sales and marketing teams will get along with one another and work together in an optimal manner. But, in the real world that seldom happens. The relationship between sales and marketing faces many challenges. In the next chapter, we will look under the hood to understand what really afflicts this interface.