Key Reasons for Conflicts Between Sales and Marketing

The two functions attract different types of people with different mind-sets who spend their time in different ways eg:

• Different cultures and personalities. Marketers tend to be highly educated, strategic, analytical and project-focused and not under immediate pressure. Sales people tend to be people-focused, skilled relationship builders, continually in contact with existing and potential customers, more attuned to what will sell. They work under higher-pressure.

• Different product strategies eg sales is about increasing sales volume in the short-term; marketing is about increasing profitability and longer term lifetime customer value and brand equity.

• Different financial objectives. It is difficult to reconcile short-term revenue with long-term profit eg when marketing sets list prices but sales has the final say over transactional pricing.

• Different feedback time frame. Sales people get relatively quick feedback from their activities. The results of marketers activities may take more time to come to fruition and be more difficult to directly measure.

The two functions under-communicate, under-perform and over-complain. Typical frictional squabblingincludes:

• Marketing people say they lead and sales follows. Sales people say they lead and marketing follows.

• Sales people say marketing people are out of touch with customers. Marketing people say sales people are only focused on narrow, short term goals, ignore corporate positioning and are too slow to get up to speed on new products. Sales may be promoting products or services the marketing team does not plan to support in the future.

• Sales people complain about low-quality leads and marketing activities that are a waste of money. Marketing people complain about off-brand messages and poor feedback from the field.

• If sales are disappointing,