On the face of it, you might think that sales and marketing departments are very different. Sales is packed full of go-getters desperate to sell, sell, sell, while marketers believe that brand is king as they dream up increasingly baffling advertising campaigns.
It’s a simplistic view and, in the real world, a little wide of the mark. Indeed, the signs are that if you want to run a successful business, then the two disciplines should be interlinked and that one needs to know what the other is doing. As Howitt managing director Gurdev Singh surmises: “Sales and marketing go hand in hand.”
The theory is that one can’t operate without the other. If you have two clued-up departments, then you can pick up and retain business in a far slicker way, and that comes through both teams having a thorough understanding of products and customers.
“Marketing activity needs to support sales activities,” says John Ricketts, UK managing director at mailing kit manufacturer Buhrs. “They need to be very strongly linked. It’s about moving into new markets or increasing market share.”
“You have to be fleet of foot in this industry,” adds Singh, “and that’s where your sales and marketing people come in. Both departments can gain information about the market. For example, they can tell you if a customer is thinking about switching to a print management firm or if a buyer has left. You need all of that information coming in on a constant basis.”
Two-way communication
The salesforce can help drive this. As Simpson Group’s marketing and sales director Ed Reid observes, it’s important they don’t just rely on the gift of the gab with current and potential customers C they need to be listening as well. It can help a print company understand where the market is heading, which can also help shape future investment in kit.
“Selling is about listening to people as much as talking,” adds Reid. “The first step is always trying to understand your customer.” Sales staff can be uniquely placed to assess the temperature of the sector and armed with this information they can help shape a marketing campaign.
“If you’re going to be a market-leading company, then you have to understand your market,” explains Reid. “You need to have good market intelligence and make sure you are thinking the same [as your clients].”
Reid knows a bit about marketing. Having worked at Nestlé Rowntree for three and a half years, as well as enjoying spells at British Steel and Diageo, Reid’s view is that print could do better when it comes to marketing its products and services C it needs to get closer to its customers and by interlinking sales and marketing, he says, you can achieve just that.
Strategic engagement
Adare has adopted this market strategy and joined up its departments. Alistair Cane, executive director for business development, explains that since the group restructured in 2007, it has been trying to move away from purely ‘selling’ to the customer.
“Our business development plan is more about strategic engagement,” he adds. “To make that meaningful, we need to do more investigative work with our clients. We are very targeted on what we work on and it’s not about staff sitting down and making hundreds of cold calls everyday.”
According to Cane, the marketing department’s aim is to educate the customer about the brand and show how broad its print management offering is. “We are going to the customer and making them aware of what Adare really is about,” he says. “A lot of educational work is done with the client. It’s driven by marketing C they create the interest and opportunity and then the business development team picks up the baton from there.”
Cane says the whole approach is a team effort; the single coherent strategy has reaped benefits and has gained a huge amount of interest. Howitt’s Singh believes that print as a whole could do with bucking up its ideas on the marketing front. “Sometimes the industry is not forward-thinking,” he says. “There is a massive lack of marketing in our industry. In FMCG, it is very slick and, in that sector, they use marketing to access the customer and find out what they want. It helps you get out to a wider audience.”
“Marketing gives you product awareness and opens doors,” adds Buhrs’ Ricketts, and if you get this right, through advertising, PR or online, it can give your company the edge.
But it still needs to be linked up to sales and in print, that department needs to shake off some old habits, according to Singh. “Sales people in this industry are still ingrained in the ways they’ve always worked,” he explains. “They are almost genetically engineered to fill capacity. You do need your salesforce to do that, but that shouldn’t be the only thing they need to be focusing on. And the marketing team can advise them on what to ask customers.”
But Adare’s Cane warns that not every company in the industry has the same needs. Your sales and marketing strategy is very much dependent on what your company is about. “There are some companies out there just interested in winning work and selling print as a commodity,” he says. The marketing team in that case does a completely different job to ours. There is no right and wrong, but whatever is fit for purpose.”
For any company that really wants to get closer to its customers, then communication is of paramount importance. And if that relationship between sales and marketing isn’t there, it can almost lead to distrust between the two departments. “For me, it is not productive for both forces to be operating separately,” says Reid.
Mutual support
Buhr’s Ricketts concurs with Reid. He has worked at companies where both departments work independently and says that he found the environment challenging. As a result, Ricketts believes: “Marketing activities need to support what the sales team is doing”
For those looking for conclusive evidence that this is the best approach, Howitt’s Singh says the results at his firm speak for themselves. “All departments in the company link up C it is the whole ethos of the business, although we are learning all the time. That’s why for our top 10 customers, we are their preferred choice C it’s through our marketing and sales teams working together.”
One of the fundamental reasons that companies link their sales and marketing is to gain a good knowledge of their customer. Forging solid customer relations will help you to not only win business, but it will also help you retain it, but only if your sales and marketing teams are pulling in the same direction.