The disconnect between sales and marketing has been around for as long as they’ve both existed: marketing creates targeted campaigns and complains that sales doesn’t follow up on leads. Sales complain that they’re not getting “quality” leads (depending on the organization, quality seems to be a moving target). Marketing develops its interpretation of messages for the guarantee (brochures, videos, direct mail, etc.) and sales presentations and sales creates its own sales presentations with different messages. The different brands of the two departments for the same product confuse the customer. The dialogue goes back and forth until management sits everyone down at the same table. Sounds familiar?

At the end of the day, sales and marketing must come together to offer a clear and consistent value proposition that allows prospects to develop a consistent brand image of the company and its products. Forrester Research recently reported similar findings in “B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Starts with the Customer.” Only six of the sixty-six sales and marketing leaders who responded to Forrester’s survey reported that the two groups worked closely together. Those are some startling statistics. The study confirms that sales and marketing have largely been working in different silos. In larger organizations and government this might not be harmful, but in small and medium-sized businesses it could be fatal.

So how can we get everyone on the same page? Start by agreeing on the ideal customer profile or the different buying personas. Persona are extremely useful in determining the buying behavior of market segments and help guide product development and branding decisions. Persona puts a face to who buys your products or services.

Then you need to decide the best channels to reach your customers. If you were a bottling machinery manufacturer, your marketing resources would be better utilized by running a banner ad on Globalspec, an engineering and industrial catalog search website, than by designing a Facebook home page.

In most cases, the corporate resource with the least amount of contact with the buyer, the CMO or CMO, tends to lead the process. In my opinion, a truly representative lineup would include the buyer in some capacity (the personas developed through marketing research and research and development) and the sales manager. And by this I mean that a substitute from another department would give his opinion. It may take longer to develop a consensus, but all parties have a vested interest in making it work.

Whatever opinion you have, bridging the gap will mean that sales and marketing will have to spend more time communicating with each other and not talking “to” each other. Who knows, maybe going to lunch with marketing or fishing with sales isn’t such a bad thing after all.