Last updated on July 31, 2022, 8:45 AM
The eternal battle between departments. How marketing and sales departments keep getting in each other’s way and possible solutions.
Prozesses & Data flows
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Depending on the size of the company, the pressure to perform on the department increases and the pressure to outperform each other. In very small companies and startups, the same people usually do part marketing and part sales. But when professionalization takes hold and the company grows, tasks have to be redistributed. New teams emerge and later also new departments and thus processes and data flows between the team / departments should also be set up and documented.
This is exactly where the disconnect usually happens, as no one feels responsible to take on this somewhat tedious task. Without well thought out business development and process management, the problem grows and gets bigger and bigger as the company grows.
I know the sales tasks through my own self-employment and have in the last 10 years as good as all constellations between marketing and sales to experience. From the own Marketing & Sales combination in my person to small start-ups of 3-10 people, to scale-ups and medium-sized companies of 20-150 people to the full-blown sales organization with 1500 sales people in a large insurance company.
But the problem remained mostly the same, as described at the beginning. It was forgotten with each growth step to exactly specify the processes. So to write up who with whom when, how and what exactly should be spoken, and/or how the needed information between people/teams/departments should be passed on / or should be documented.
The solution
From my experience, the solution is capturing the processes in the teams & departments and a good process documentation. It is easiest if you start with your own activities and think about which of them can be described well and easily. It doesn’t really matter where, i.e. in which system you start the documentation. However, it is easier to start with a solution like Confluence from Atlassian. Also Meister Note from Austrian company Meister could be an exciting challenger to top dog Confluence :)
It is also crucial that a company-wide agreement on how to build this documentation and how processes are written up is discussed and defined. Because otherwise there is again chaos, since everyone simply writes it up in their own way :)
If the first step is done, it is easy to tackle the processes and documentation between the departments.
It’s boring, it’s tedious and nobody will ever thank you for it. That is also why I think good business development people should tackle this problem and give their colleagues guidance for it.
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 has already been achieved.
Here you can go a lot deeper and further define every detail, but for now the above aspects are enough. And in another blogpost I will present my ideal ideas here as well.
So, get to the keyboards and put you heads together to work on your processes and work steps and how you can best record them in writing so that the cooperation between the departments is defined as clearly and transparently as possible. Because that just solves an incredible amount of problems in most companies from small to quite big.