I recently attended a sales and marketing workshop designed to improve the interaction between marketing and sales. It was moderated by an external consulting company, results I have yet to see, but here’s the take out as I saw it.

1. Marketing in b2b doesn’t sit naturally in the organisational driving seat as it would in a b2c organisation – its internal influence depends on General Management’s positioning of marketing.

2. Sales people, especially those managing large key accounts, have a lot of customer knowledge and thereby power and know it. This can be an advantage if leveraged correctly.

3. Many sales people see marketing as a support function for sales. The added value of marketing clearly needs to be well articulated and backed-up by performance in customer-specific projects.

4. Many sales people are very protective of “their” customers, sometimes overly so. Organisations need to break this defensiveness down in a way that leaves everyone with a benefit. CRM is a good starting point, but needs to be communicated as more than just another task for the guys in sales.

5. Knowledge of customer needs and drivers is often latent in the heads of the sales folk, it needs systematising. Knowledge management is something that scares many people as potentially too complex, but simpler forms of this really help crystallise and formalise knowledge, so that it can be captured.

6. Managing the innovation process is something that individual sales people can’t do, and marketing needs to grab this one and drive it forward internally.

7.  Mutual respect between sales and marketing requires both parties to take a step towards one another. Marketing people are advised to listen when sales complain about them being too theoretical, too far from customers’ real needs. Sales people need to start seeing the larger picture and not always bashing on about their customer need here, their customer need there….a kind of sales myopia, ironically.

Finally, pretty much everybody profited from actually being able to air their views in a joint forum, and the consensus was that this should be repeated – offsite if possible – at least twice a year.