The synergy between sales and marketing has been talked about for ages. Nevertheless, every now and then you come across the statement “marketing just flies around in its own spheres and doesn’t understand anything about sales!” or “those salespeople are really stupid if they don’t properly utilize our marketing outputs!”. No matter what you do, you can’t seem to find a common language – but why?

The problem of centralization and decentralization

The larger the company, the further away sales and marketing are often separated from each other. Centralized or global marketing aims for efficiency and harmonized messages that support the company's vision and strategy. At the same time, sufficient support for the everyday work of sales is often forgotten. The interaction between sales and marketing is non-existent.

Many international companies go through organizational cycles. They centralize, manage, plan, and implement in silos, and when that doesn't work, they move more to local operations closer to the customer, and they realize that they are doing the same things in many different places, which is again inefficient and inconsistent. Then they centralize again.

Agile sales and marketing collaboration that transcends silos

An organization has a purpose, and simply changing the organization will not necessarily change anything in what is being done. Planning and doing together across organizational boundaries is the key. This is easy to say, but harder to do.

A willingness and framework must be created for teaming up around an offer or customer relationships. It is the management's job to encourage agile collaboration. A dream situation would be, for example, virtual teams that transcend silos, where sales, marketing, service management, and technology or industry consultants would manage customer relationships together, and expense and hour records and rewards would be well-managed to support productive collaboration.

This type of work, where the team close to the customer has the power and budget to decide what kind of customer-specific sales, marketing and service production work will result in a satisfied customer. A satisfied customer, in turn, buys more in quantity, is willing to pay more for the service and at the same time brings in more margin, i.e. customer profitability.

In this case, the team also takes responsibility for its own performance. They have a versatile toolkit at their disposal, which includes company services, management support, experts, a marketing arsenal, technologies such as generative artificial intelligence and automation, and in-depth customer and industry knowledge.

How can collaboration be made a part of everyday life?

It is therefore important to create a collaborative model that is based on deep customer understanding and is able to react to customer and market situations – i.e. produces exactly the kind of results that are needed at this moment in time. Sales therefore become more predictable, efficient and customer-specific, resulting in increased cash flow and smarter use of working hours amidst the hustle and bustle of everyday life. This also makes the interaction between sales and marketing more productive.

In principle, creating collaboration is not difficult, just laborious. By game-writing the most important things such as classifying and managing customer relationships, sales and marketing, a functional framework is created for agile customer-specific actions at different stages of the customer journey. These stages include, for example, the first purchase, increasing cooperation or even winning a single project.

Within this framework, virtual teams operate independently, agilely, efficiently and responsibly, creating:

A marketing and sales plan that supports the client's strategic and company goals.
Customer-specific sales and marketing activities that can be changed and improved quickly based on the customer situation.
Customer relationship management model, which produces good customer satisfaction and customer profitability as well as comprehensive customer journey support.

With management support, sales and marketing work together to make everyday life easier

The more difficult part is implementing these things into everyday life. Management has an important role and responsibility in enabling such agile operations.

Effective agile teams that cross silos must have power and appropriate resources readily available without overwhelming bureaucracy. Of course, these teams must also have accountability for delivering results.

Management therefore requires the ability to trust, the desire to hold individuals accountable, and coaching leadership training in everyday life, in order to provide the necessary dynamism for work. Team members, in turn, are required to have work community and cooperation skills so that instead of mutual disagreements, they can focus on working together with a goal in mind.

The agile ones fix the pot

In both large and small companies, work can easily become siloed as the organization grows. Line organizations also have their advantages. However, organizations today do not need to define everything they do. It is possible to build agile, cross-border operating models.

Agile sales and marketing, working together around customers and their individual needs, is the key to simultaneously achieving satisfied customers and happy, well-paid sales and marketing professionals. And of course, the company benefits from increased customer profitability.