I conducted a teleseminar recently for the marketing alliance partners for Sage Software, makers of ACT!, Peachtree and SageCRM software. The title was “What does sales really need from marketing” and my guests for the session were Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies and Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.
The session was set-up to duke out the classic sales vs. marketing battle and I thought Brian and Jill would be the perfect panelists to do just that, but boy did they blow it. See, instead of debating who let the company down, sales or marketing, they ended up convincing the listening audience of this lame idea that sales and marketing should actually work together. That if you actually go out and talk to your customers, they will tell you what they need and then both sales and marketing could be on the same page – the customer page.
Jill Konrath and Brian Carroll are two of the brightest voices going on this subject and they work great as a team too.
Note: At some point a caller comes on and gushes about what a great teleseminar this was and that she wanted to buy both Brian and Jill’s books – that was not my mom.
