I have to agree with your assessment that there is a disconnect between sales & marketing.

In our case, sales people are under tremendous pressure to produce immediate revenue. They are less than patient with marketing campaigns that may take weeks or months to generate any tangible results.

I'm very interested in following this series Paul. Thanks for the great job you do with these podcasts.

Great podcast! It's very refreshing to get a sales perspective as I think it is extremely important for marketing to really understand the dynamics of the sales and marketing relationship. I recently posted a "fun" perspective on my blog that discusses marketing from a sales perspective... http://www.b2bmarketingevolved.blogspot.com/.

At Rubicon we work with many clients that struggle with the "frictionless" relationship as Bill discusses and I thought I would add to some of his points.

First, to truly drive towards that goal sales and marketing must be understand the key objective of BOTH sales and marketing is to generate revenue. AND, that both organizations will be much better off working together than individually.

To accomplish this companies must also look at three key areas:

People
Process and
Technology

I really liked the point Bill made about marketing thinks about numbers. That is absolutely the case with many of the clients we see. Instead of thinking about numbers they should focus on generating "qualified" business opportunities not just leads. This definition is not something that can be defined in a one department or the other it must be an agreed upon definition.

Next, I would encourage marketing and sales to study and gain an understanding of the customers buying process (this is different from the sales process for all you sales people). Bill mentions in the podcast that prospects now can own the dialogue, when and where they interact with your company and whom they interact with. This is a very important point because marketing and sales must understand that the content you provide and when you provide it (as well as to whom you provide it too when you are selling a solution or service that involves supporters, influencer's, economic buyers, etc) should map to the customers buying process. It should almost be viewed as a road map from the point of educating the prospect of your solution through to them becomming a customer.

Finally, I would also add that marketing and sales should define when and where they "own" the communication. I have a slight disagreement with Bill in that many sales teams do not want marketing communicating to prospects in the latter stages of their sales process... While there is always exceptions to this rule companies should do their best to define when and where marketing and sales own the communications.

Thanks for your podcast, it was great.

Robert J. Moreau
EVP Sales, Marketing & Client Solutions
Rubicon Marketing Group

Another fantastic interview Paul. Those folks from Marketo just keep on giving great insight.

Very interesting perspective from the sales side. But, I'm glad to see this message passed along to more marketers. I've learned in my time with my current company that the quantity of leads doesn't much matter if sales can't act on them.

I've had a bit of a struggle but we are getting much better at working with Sales to figure out where to find leads that are going to be the most valuable to them.

Keep up the great podcasts.

I think that this is great. It can really be challenging to make a connection between sales and marketing. Marketing Software also helps a great deal.
Thanks