Creating A Sense Of Urgency: Why Marketing Must Behave Like Sales

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Creating A Sense Of Urgency: Why Marketing Must Behave Like Sales




This article is by Julie Parrish, senior VP and CMO

What’s the quickest way to prioritize a global marketing team and align an organization to create a culture of success? Quite simply, look at your sales team.

Sales departments operate under a near constant sense of urgency, which gives them an extraordinary degree of focus and the need to make decisions quickly. Salespeople are always striving to meet predetermined monthly, quarterly and yearly sales targets. For many people in sales, this process is intensified by the reality that their compensation is tied to meeting and exceeding those targets. As a result, members of a sales department (almost to a fault) have an intense focus on which next immediate priority, decision and step will better enable them to meet their goals. They also measure their results, review/adjust their strategies, and stay focused on their goals.

Let’s compare that reality to the one often experienced by those in marketing, for example. Most marketing departments have a long list of priorities and complex strategies from what can be a dizzying host of different internal and external clients. They must balance between being the convenient internal go-to for projects that span the gamut from the inconsequential to the most intensely public. Marketers also have to balance core business impact functions such as driving product adoption, pipeline and brand relevance, often resulting in being very loaded down with more projects than they can conceivably handle.

The result for both the marketing department itself and, really, all the internal tributaries that flow into it these types of projects is the kind of confusion that can make it difficult to maintain focus on objectives that matter the most: those that will ultimately drive sales. And with the velocity of today’s business, it’s all too easy for this to become standard operating procedure, as marketing maintains a dead sprint on a treadmill of work that will not demonstrably benefit the business.

If marketing is empowered to view its mission through a “sales-focused” lens, it will be able to focus its efforts on the marketing campaigns that meet two primary objectives: increasing velocity and adoption of new products introduced into the market and adding qualified opportunities to sales pipelines. Everything that marketing does, including driving brand relevance and awareness, should ultimately contribute to these two areas. In marketing, sales is my No. 1 customer. I have worked to have our teams talk less about brand impressions and numbers of people at events (all important and relevant) and more about qualified pipeline opportunities. This simple change better aligns us with sales and gives sales confidence that we “get it.”

Marketers also need to develop measurable goals that can be monitored regularly to allow for course corrections along the way. Sales leaders are constantly looking at trends and patterns in weekly forecasts pipeline, wins, losses, what products are getting traction, and so on, and using the information to adjust strategies along the way to make sure of a successful outcome. In marketing we now produce a dashboard that has daily, weekly, monthly and semiannual data refreshes for key metrics so we can monitor results and adjust if/as needed. If marketing can speak the same language as sales, that’s half the battle. And, of course, marketing sometimes might need to step out of its comfort zone and make decisions quickly to align with the fast-paced action happening in sales.

It is critical for members of sales and marketing to realize that their objectives are essentially the same. That realization not only is hugely transformative for the people in those departments, it also can have a major impact on the entire business. Amazing things happen when marketing and sales are in tune with each other. Very quickly, an internal alignment forms across an entire company that champions creating real benefits for partners and customers. Time-consuming distractions fall away, and often the wins start accumulating. Partners in particular cherish this synergy and alignment as extended sales forces.

And where to start doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, sales teams know that customer loyalty is primarily won through experience with a company and/or brand, and therefore the entire organization must be focused on consistent delivery of the brand promise. Marketing teams must take ownership of this need for consistency and work to provide coordinated strategies across marketing teams connecting directly with sales teams and functions. This coordinated effort will drive improved brand perception, which is the driver for customer acquisition/retention and partner loyalty. This integration should encompass an understanding of creative online and offline marketing strategies that balance sales enablement and brand awareness. The challenge for marketers is to align all of a company’s marketing resources to relevantly connect brands with consumers. Sales teams have been doing this for years, providing deep relationships and points of contact for customers.

Is an internally aligned, highly focused marketing organization that inspires different departments, divisions and teams to work together to deliver real, measurable results for clients and customers possible? Yes, with work, of course. If you want marketing to ultimately deliver sales, think like sales.


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