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Tim Walker: Hello everyone. This is Tim Walker, an editor with Hoover’s, and I’d like to welcome you to our Sales and Marketing Insights series. My guest today is Jim Curry, vice president of sales here at Hoover’s. Today we’re talking about some best practices for harmonizing your sales and marketing departments. So Jim, first of all, many companies suffer from a divide between sales and marketing or at least that’s the perception. Why do you think that is?

Jim Curry: It’s been my experience, Tim, that the divide or silo behavior as you might be talking about are coming back because they don’t share goals. There is not a clear destination that the sales and marketing team are sharing and it’s easy to see why that wall between them exists.

Walker: Well, do you think that these silos, do you think it has more to do with the function of sales versus the function of marketing or does it have something to do with the cultures of most sales and most marketing departments? Because it seems to me like all the sales marketing people I’ve talked to, I’ve met tons of nice people in both of those roles, but in general sales people tend to sort of operate one way with a certain mindset, marketing people have a different mindset. Do you think it’s culture or do you think it’s...

Curry: There’s probably a little of culture at play. I think you would get to believe that sales people think they are really good marketers and marketers think they don’t really need sales people at times and you know, just dialogue will bridge that gap with what really the role of each plays in the process of finding a prospect and consummating a sale. So each has very critical role and I think that, culturally, people like to be very proud of what they do and tend to minimize perhaps what the other role is.

Curry: I think people want to feel really responsible for their own success and they don’t want to, you know, they’ll often blame others when they fail but take responsibility with knowing their success and I think it’s important to be successful as an organization that both people take responsibility for when there’s failure on either side and both people get praised when there’s success.

Walker: Share the success.

Curry: Absolutely.

Walker: You actually are anticipating my next question is, what can organizations do if they’re suffering from this kind of divide? What are some of the specific steps they can do to bridge it?

Curry: First, you really need a clear shared goal. So, we need to understand where we’re going. We’re here today, where do we want to be in three months, in six months, in a year? So let’s agree on the goal. OK, once we have the goal alignment, then we need to understand what are the roles and responsibilities that each are going to play? What are the expectations? So Tim, if you’re going to do X and Y, I’m going to do A and B, the accountability is these other things and once there’s clarity around expectations and clarity around goal, then all you need to do is hold people accountable to those expectations.

Walker: Well, it seems like and that isn’t so many other things, step one is figuring out how will we know when we win? What’s going to tell us that we’ve actually succeeded and if you can work backwards from there, people can get on the same page.

Curry: So you know, like in any sports analogy, it’s how do you keep score and then who’s playing what positions?

Walker: So, you as a seller, thinking strictly from your own selfish perspective as somebody running a sales organization, what is it that you know sellers want from marketers in that relationship?

Curry: Sellers want, like anything, want their life to be easy and how marketing can help there is giving them clear, understandable collateral that’s easy to understand, it’s at their fingertips at all times. They want stuff that’s up to date and fresh. They want marketers to drive the excitement into the prospects. They want them to educate the prospects as well but not to the degree that maybe marketers would think. Sales people tend to believe that marketers may at times, spend a little too much, some from my experience at least, spend a little too much time on educating and not enough time on driving excitement. So you’re trying to diagnose. The sales person is trying to diagnose, get someone intrigued to your point or get some interested in the product and let the sales person diagnose what the best solution, the best fit for that customer is.

Walker: Excellent. Now, thinking about it from the other way around, you’ve been a seller for a long time, not just in this company but before this, so what’s, in your experience, what is it that marketers are looking for from sellers?

Curry: My experience is that marketers are looking for sales people to execute on their obligations so to close the deal is the easiest way to look at it and to use the language and the brand message that the marketers are trying to put out in the marketplace. So they want to not only to close the deal but close it in a way that’s consistent with their branding that they put out there in the market.

Walker: Because marketers see that as what’s going to be sustainable over time. We’re going to keep building a brand around consistent messages.

Curry: Absolutely.

Walker: I can mention for the folks in the audience that Jim runs our sales organization and I actually am part of the marketing organization at Hoover’s and we’ve gotten along famously for years. On behalf of Jim Curry and the rest of us at Hoover’s, thank you all for listening to Sales and Marketing Insight. I’m Tim Walker. Please join us again for more insights into the world of sales and marketing. For detailed information about companies, people, and industries, visit Hoover’s.com and see why we are the fastest path to business.