Marketing and Sales: Never shall the twain meet?

I was recently taking a class on sales management, and the inevitable questions of sales vs. marketing, what is the difference between the two, and where is the handoff from one to another came up. It is interesting that among practictioners in organizations there is an almost religious belief that the two are by nature adversorial and the two 'camps' engage in more finger pointing than any other closely related departments, especially in B2B scenarios.

There are some real differences. For example, the perspectives differ in terms of time range and distance from the sale transaction. Marketing tends to be medium and long term gazing into future sustainability while sales is about present survival. Marketing is about markets defined by some delineating parameters while sales is about the current opportunity that can be addressed by current products and services. Marketing is strategic in terms of the universe of opportunities, all competition, market and technology trends while sales is tactical about specific opportunities, strategies to close the deal on the table, and contextual competition. Marketing's job is to help the company consistently be among the top buying choices while sales is about making it the only choice. Marketers tend to be analytical, company biased, creative trend-spotters and value oriented while salespeople tend to be emotionally intelligent, situationally creative, prospect biased and revenue oreinted. And one can go on...

The trick is to be able to align the two in their objectives and identify the areas of cooperation in the buying funnel. There should be no clear handoff point but like in a relay a stretch where both are running and the baton is exchanged at the most optimal point. Kotler et al have dealt with this alignment in a HBR article "End the war between sales and marketing" well. they provide both a diagonstic to determine where your sales and marketing alignment is and in what circumstances should you try to move to a higher level of alignment among four defined levels - undefined, defined, aligned and integrated.

In my experience, the lack of alignment in any organization is directly proportional to the CEO's or top management's perception of value in the two functions, and unfortunately you find more of them giving short shrift to marketing than they do to sales. As a marketer, this misalignment usually leads to a disproportionate time being spent on downstream (tactical) marketing activities which is a losing proposition over time if the upstream (strategic) is not given its due.