Know-How Exchange : Other

Good question!

Sales and Marketing a very differnent with regards to their responsibilities and the very nature of the respective definitions.

In a nutshell, Marketing creates the message and appropriate branding, channels, promotion, and analysis for a product or service....Sales delivers it.

Ironically, many good marketers are horrible salepeople. Marketing focuses on the who what and why, where sales utilizes the information provided by the marketing team to push the service using their personalities and an the tactics provided by the marketing team. Too many companies get the roles reversed and consider marketing as nothing more than a bunch of people who design ads, and rely on their sales team to push the company forward "blindly" with smiles and free pens.

It can be helpful to have a "fused director" if they understand the difference and are not swayed to one side....this is where the disadvantage comes in.

If your director is primarily a sales person, they may neglect or patronize marketing necessities and vice-versa.

Therefore, I would recommend separating the position. You will get MUCH better results and create specialization internally.

Here are some links to some past threads discussing similar issues:

https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=353

https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=324

You may also search through the articles on this site for more clarification.

Good Luck!

A Story That Is More Common Than Not:

1) Marketing develops a plan. It is executed

2) The leads come into the sales department or from cold-calling (what's that?)

3) The sales people cherry pick the good leads. They put these into their “Top 10 Hit List. This equals +- 20% of the total leads.

4) The rest are put into the “2nd-Tier Prospect” list. “We’ll get to them after we close the Top 10.”

5) They are never called because with the 20% above the top sales people hit their plans and don’t have to work anymore – no motivation, no more monetary incentive. The other 80% of the sales force are always looking for another job anyway, so threats to fire them doesn’t motivate them because they “don’t make enough here anyway because the product and marketing sucks".

6) Sales force says they never called on the other 80% because they are “bad leads” (that’s the story sales gives). They put the blame on marketing because their plan produced these bad leads.

7) From the beginning of this process marketing has never got any feedback until the end when they are accused of implementing a plan that wasn’t effective. They thought they were do a good job because the top 20% where hitting their numbers so plan was achieved.

8) Why? Simple. There were no feedback mechanisms in place to measure the return on the marketing investment.

The point of the story is that there is this disconnect inherent between sales and marketing. CRM didn’t solve this. ERP didn’t solve this. If anything they widened the chasm.

To answer your question what are the advantages and disadvantages etc?

Advantages: Obviously the advantage would be to narrow this chasm of disconnect. This would in most operations be a wonderful thing. But due to do such divergent goals and objectives (other than of course “to increase sales and valuation”) realistically might not be possible, other than agree to increase sales and valuation.

Disadvantages: Again goes back to goals and objectives being so dissimilar. Compensation is dissimilar. Motivations etc. But this can be good because the best sales people are bulldogs and are not methodical enough to be good marketers.

BTW, this is a very debatable question any day of the week.