The #1 Reason Why Your Marketing and Sales Teams Don’t Get Along

As a business leader do you feel like your marketing and sales teams are not aligned or they can never seem to understand each other?

You’re not alone. This is often the case for small businesses where the individuals in the company can feel organizational ebbs and flows more distinctly than in larger companies.

However, I am also here to tell you it doesn’t have to be this way. There is one glaring reason why your marketing and sales teams don’t get along and it stems countless others. Fortunately, it is not a hard fix but if you do it can dramatically transform the conversation and start to create alignment.

How Your Compensation Plans Determine How Well You Really Understand Marketing

This is a super simple exercise to see if you really understand the role of marketing in your organization. I’m guessing your marketing and sales compensation works something like this:

• Marketing is salaried and their goals primarily center around leads generated
• Sales is low base and high commission and their goal and compensation is strictly aligned to revenue

Now ask yourself:

Why is sales’ compensation directly correlated to revenue generated?

Say your answer out loud and make it real.

Awesome, so next hunch, you probably just said something like you are paying them to sell.

Correct! I totally agree.

Now let’s try this with marketing.

Why is marketing salaried?

This guessing game is not so easy. I have heard everything from:

• I need them to support whatever we need
• They need to generate leads
• Well there is no way to really measure marketing success so they have to be salary

These are all wrong. These are all wrong. THESE 👏 ARE 👏 ALL 👏 WRONG 👏

These answers treat marketing like an executive assistant who sadly just got handed a little thing called marketing to do in his/her spare time. Even more unfortunate is that this is how so many small business leaders think and it is not only holding back marketing it is holding back sales and larger organizational growth.

How Should Marketing Be Compensated?

Before we get to the logistics of compensation, we first need to correctly identify the reason you hire a marketing team. It is not to generate leads (but that is part of it).

You pay marketing to facilitate sales.

Working backward from this, marketing should have goals directly aligned to the sales numbers they are supposed to help facilitate and when they hit those goals they should receive something as a reward. I personally like a quarterly bonus structure but whatever you decide you want it to incentive them to keep replicating this behavior every day they come to work.

How Do Marketing Bonuses Help Marketing and Sales Work Well Together

The same way offering commission pushes a sales rep to try and close more deals every month, a revenue-based bonus plan pushes marketing to help sales close more deals every month. They now have skin in the game.

Think of it like this.

You are running a race with three other people. Do you think deeply about what the other people need to do in order for them to win? Probably not. You are probably just thinking about what you need to win and maybe where your competition is at along the way. You only focus on pushing yourself as hard as you want because in the end whether you win or lose is really in your hands alone.

Now, imagine yourself running a three-legged race. You have a partner and you can only win if your partner wins. If you run at a speed too fast or too slow it will cause your partner or you to fall or get off balance. If your partner is unmotivated and wants to quit, you need to encourage him/her to keep going so you both have a chance to win. Your potential for success is literally and figuratively tied together. If you win it was because you worked together.

It is the same with this compensation structure. In the version where marketing is only salary, they are only thinking about what they need to do in order to cross the finish line and get paid. They pay little attention to what sales is doing. Now, if you tie their compensation together they will quickly start to develop an interest in helping sales win because that means they win.

When marketing starts having a vested interest in sales’ success, they will begin to spend more time:

• Reviewing deals for what worked and didn’t so they can replicate the journey for new buyers
• Listening to sales’ issues with open deals and processes and trying to solve for these problems
• Asking what they can provide customers and sales to make the experience better and easier

There Will Still Be Marketing & Sales Conflict But It will Be Healthy Conflict

Even in the healthiest and most aligned organizations, conflict will arise. Marketing and sales will still dispute campaigns and tactics but by aligning them to the same goals the conflict should become more productive and even start to illicit better ideas.