The eternal battle between departments. How marketing and sales departments always get in each other’s way and possible solutions.
Processes & data flows
Depending on the size of the company, the pressure on your own department increases. In very small companies and start-ups, the same people usually do part marketing and part sales. But as professionalization takes hold and the company grows, tasks have to be redistributed. New teams are created and later new departments and processes and data flows between the teams/departments should also be set up and recorded.
This is exactly where the break usually happens, as no one feels responsible for taking on this somewhat boring task. Without well-thought-out business development and process management, the problem slowly grows and gets bigger and bigger.
I know sales work through my own self-employment and have been able to experience almost all constellations between marketing and sales over the last 10 years. From my own marketing & sales combination to small start-ups of 3-10 people, to scale-ups and medium-sized companies of 20-150 people, to a full-fledged sales organization with 1500 sales people in a large insurance company.
However, as described at the beginning, the problem mostly remained the same. At every step of growth, the processes were forgotten to define exactly who should speak to whom, when, how and what exactly, or how the required information should be forwarded/or recorded.
The solution
From my experience -> Recording the processes in the teams & departments and good process documentation. Here every team and every employee essentially has to take their own steps. It’s easiest if you start with your own activities and think about which of them can be described well and simply. Where, i.e. in which system you start the documentation, doesn’t really matter. However, it’s easier with a solution like Confluence from Atlassian. Meister Note from the Austrian company Meister could also become an exciting challenger to the top dog Confluence :).
It is also important here to have a company-wide agreement on how to set up this documentation and describe the processes. Because otherwise there will be another wild chaos as everyone just writes wildly :)
Once the first step has been taken, it is easy to tackle the processes and documentation between the departments.
It’s boring, it’s tedious and no one will ever thank you for it. That’s why I also believe that good business developers should tackle this problem and give their colleagues guidance on it. But well, I haven’t experienced it yet.
If marketing and sales put their heads together and clearly define which terms mean what, when exactly a handover of data/leads takes place, how this data has to be transferred and who is responsible for it, a lot will be gained.
Here you can go a lot deeper and define it further, but for now the aspects mentioned above are enough. And in another blog post I will also present my ideal ideas here.
So, get to the keyboards and let your brains spin about your processes and work steps and how you can best record them in writing so that the collaboration between the departments is defined as clearly and transparently as possible. Because that simply solves an incredible number of problems in most companies, from small to very large.