Sales Vee Marketing
In this insightful series we’ll point you towards the Holy Grail of SMarketing (without opening a Pandora’s box). We draw on years of experience in helping B2B businesses get it right – and there’s plenty of actionable tips along the way to ensure you too can make it happen.
You’d be hard pushed to find a wittier, shorter and more excruciatingly caustic summary of the marketing vs sales situation than this off-the-cuff but bang-on-target explanation by Gary Vee (or Gary Vaynerchuk, as he’s known when not online).
It’s worth hearing it again. As he cracks heads together, he outlines the main beliefs, attitudes and values that have driven a wedge between those in sales and their next of kin in marketing. Very quickly he slips into the persona of a coach offering a dressing-room dressing-down of a disunified and poorly performing football team.
Let’s turn the hair-dryer on.
‘Sales and marketing orgs hate each other because they have different objectives.
Salespeople…
In just one move your marketing team can change everything for you: one activation at a conference, one video for Facebook, one sponsorship.
They’re like Mike Tyson – one punch and the job’s done. And there’s nothing salespeople can ever do to match the impact of one killer marketing campaign.
Marketers…
You’re full of shit, you’re fluffy and you’re highbrow. I don’t care about your degrees: most of the stuff you do doesn’t matter.
You preen and pout like prima donnas while sales graft, day in and day out, to clean up all the mistakes you make.
They don’t have the luxury of a budget – and you have one that asks for no quantifiable evidence of success. They can’t say to the CFO, ‘Well, the long-term impact of that conversation I had will be blah, blah, blah’.
They simply have to make sales. And everyone just looks at their closing numbers without giving them any credit for the set-up.
The long and short of it, ladies and gents, is that we need to get our team completely aligned to create a cohesive unit.’