Sales and the marketing function: a critical analysis with examples

Sales as the Heart of Marketing

Sales is at the Center of Marketing

The worse the economic climate in an industry or economy, the greater the level of battling that goes on between marketing and sales for the direction of all customer-facing strategies. The current recession has just accentuated and exacerbated this issue, with sales winning the majority of the time due to their better understanding of customer needs. In debating if marketing or sales is actually driving marketing, it's clear that sales has more self-interest ins take in seeing lead generation, lead escalation, lead nurturing and sales cycles succeeding. A large proportion of sales' income is directly affected by the effectiveness and precision by which marketing strategies are executed, which leads to this group fighting to dominate the role in many companies (Paparoidamis, Guenzi, 2009). The tougher the economic climate the greater urgency sales professionals have to protect their current income and earn at least a proportion of their bonus (Turner, Lasserre, Beauchet, 2007).

Finding the Voice of the Customer and Acting on it

With so many digital channels and marketing techniques available for marketers to choose from and quantify their strategies to understand their effectiveness on target markets, the marketing profession could reach a level of precision never seen before. The role of digital marketing continues to be all-encompassing between upper and lower sales funnel analysis, providing a level of precision to marketing efforts that makes Return on Investment (ROI) possible to track and attain for each strategy or program (Edelman, 2010). Ironically, however marketers have adopted digital marketing so strongly that they have neglected to take into account those factors that cannot be quantified. The voice of the customer including their unmet needs, requirements, and needs for future products are seldom as neatly quantified as a digital marketing campaign defies this level of qualitative data capturing. Marketing has never been more quantified in its approach, measurable yet in this quantification the emotions, frustrations, concerns and needs of customers that defy quantification are often completely forgotten.

On this issue is where sales are taking control of marketing. Sales spend time with customers in person and can quickly interpret their emotions, from the frustration and unmet needs to the areas of a company's performance that delight them and get them to their goals. Sales understand how customers think in great depth and can quickly understand what needs they have. Sales managers and more senior sales professionals are so good at anticipating customer needs they can orchestrate the development of entire products or companies.

An example of how pervasive sales can drive marketing is the inception and rapid growth of Salesforce.com (Campbell-Kelly, 2009). Salesforce.com is the leading provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation applications. The company was founded by a series of sales executives from Oracle Corporation who realized that the future of enterprise software was going to shift drastically away from on-premise, expensive licensing agreements and migrate to being able to lease only the applications needed. This is the essence of the SaaS business model, which the sales executives who founded Salesforce.com helped to define as they grew their business (Campbell-Kelly, 2009). Would Salesforce.com be as successful as they are right now without having sales executives driving the development of the application? Most likely not because the highly specific needs of enterprise software buyers for CRM systems needed to be understood in detail for the company to build such effective applications. Sales executives from Oracle who now run Salesforce.com marketing drive their marketing campaigns with personalized strategies instead of relying purely on the digital techniques so many marketers prefer.