The popular perception of sales and marketing relationships is of open conflict with each seeming to speak a different language. That scenario definitely does exist in some b2b organisations big and small… but successful organisations tend to have sales and marketing working together with a much greater level of harmony.

Whats the secret?  It’s no great mystery, organisations with teams successfully working together share a number of similar attributes:

Shared targets – both teams are working to the same set of pipeline targets and are focussed on the same market and customer segments

Shared understanding – both teams understand and work with the same overall sales process and undertsand each other’s roles in that process. More than that, they respect each other’s roles.

Shared time horizons – both teams report over the same time frames. They both understand the time involved in taking a cold prospect through to a face to face meeting and they both understand the timelines involved in planning and implanting marketing activity

Shared systems – shared access to CRM systems is a must and ideally transparent viewing of all activity from sales calls through to reporting from marketing automation.

Of course in reality it isn’t always that simple, but if the foundations of sharing and transparency are in place even b2b sales and b2b marketing teams can start to deliver amazing results.