I’m presenting a workshop this week titled – How to get sales and marketing on the same page.

The point of the discussion is to help the audience, made up of marketers and the sales people for those marketers, understand that while they may indeed perform unique and necessary functions, they have shared objectives.

So, while, as the title of this post suggests, the gap between what sales does and what marketing does in support may seem vast (and perhaps even at odds) there is an absolute need to strike a balance between their independent and interdependent selves.

What you are reading is one part of a two part post – the other, by the way, is titled – Those idiots in marketing just don’t get it. In case you want in on the joke, the body of both posts is the same, only the names have been changed to expose the guilty. So, that’s the real point – to be more effective sales teams should learn how to be more about ideas and relevant conversations (more like marketing), to be more effective marketing should learn how to build better relationships (more like sales).

To further illustrate my point I’d like to offer my definition of marketing: marketing is – getting someone who has a need to know, like and trust you. Now let’s blend in my definition of sales: sales is – taking know, like and trust and converting it to try, buy, repeat and refer.

See, for now marketing owns the conversation, the idea, and sales owns the relationship. Wouldn’t sales and marketing life be grand if organizations learned how to use relevant conversations to build better customer relationships instead of metrics and quotas destined to keep their teams off the same page.