Sales just speak to the client, it's Marketing who decides what they say

I recently had a meeting with Neil Rackham (creator of SPIN Selling) and during our conversation we got onto the subject of why for all the focus on "solution selling, too many sales people focussed on features and did a pitch. We both agree that one of the major reasons for this was the internal failures between sales and marketing.

Neil then proceeded to give me one of the best descriptions of the challenge sales and marketing face. It was not a new approach, but the clarity which he gave the issues was impressive.

The key issue is one of expectations. The client clearly knows the steps they need to go through to make a decision, and the sales/marketing organisation knows what they need to supply to support the client make a decision. So where does it all go wrong?

The failure stems from a lack of clarity as to who owns delivery of the components. The most common outcome is that sales and marketing revert to type and we end up with:

• Marketing producing literature that is inward focussed ("here are our features") and then tells the customer what the benefits are.
• Sales scrambles around trying to work out why anyone would buy their solution and resorts to "pitching".

Next week we will look at some of the steps we can take to address this issue.

If you have any examples of the imbalance between sales and marketing (from either a sales, marketing or customer perspective) please share them by placing a comment.