Sales vs. Marketing: The shared challenge of B2B

Clients always want potential agencies to demonstrate knowledge of their industry - do you have experience with my PRODUCTS? But, an equally valid measure of competence might be - do you have experience with my PROBLEMS?

Many, many B2B marketers seem to share the same struggles - and figuring out how to talk about their products generally isn't one of them. Much more challenging issues tend to grow from the battle between sales and marketing - for dollars, leadership and trust.

PROBLEMS to understand for marketers in traditional B2B sales organizations:

1. Teaching an army of sales guy to understand how marketing works / what to expect from it
2. Convincing leaders who grew up in sales to invest in marketing
3. Mining deeper information about the customer base - or, really anything beyond name, company, projection
4. And - in lieu of the budget to do lots of research - pushing the limits of the shared corporate assumptions about who those customers are
5. Successfully communicating the difference between branding, marketing and lead gen
6. Facing the unrealistic expectations for results with the ridiculously small budget challenge
7. Tracking results / getting information back from the sales team
8. More often than not - being the only woman at the table
9. Controlling the message in the field
10. Maintaining momentum

Attendees at DMA's DM Days identified these shared troubles:

• Eighty-seven percent of B2B marketers have little confidence in their customer data
• Fifty-four percent of B2B companies surveyed indicated that the lack of sales and marketing collaboration is their most important challenge.
• Fifty-two percent of companies surveyed claimed to have integration between their sales and marketing systems.
• Thirty-nine percent of respondents indicated that data-related issues were the next challenge facing their marketing efforts.

Survey source: Media Buyer Planner

Comments

[Robert Rosenthal]

B-to-B marketers constantly hire consultants to improve systems. Some of them should think about bringing in psychologists to help figure out how to finally get sales reps to allow marketing people to do their job.