There's a phrase I use a lot:
\n\n\nA good salesman will sell you things you don't want.
\nA good marketer will make you want things you don't need.
\n
Note the difference? Most companies don't.
\nCompanies still insist on lumping \"sales and marketing\" together into a single department, or worse, under the same manager, then act surprised when their two-headed monster invariably runs amok.
\nThat's because Sales and Marketing are two distinct skills and finding someone who is exceptional at both is a lot harder than you might expect.
\nGo on any job board you'll invariably see lots of open Sales and Marketing Manager positions. They're often with small to mid-sized companies hoping to fulfil two roles with a single salary. Sure, you're halving your costs, but you also risk halving your performance relative to your competitors.
\nBoth disciplines are trying to sell the same customer the same thing, except marketing usually gets there first. Both live or die on actually understanding that customer, just at different points of the funnel.
\nSplit Sales and Marketing into two into departments that never talk, and you don't get specialisation, you get two teams playing guessing games, instead of collaborating to form a cohesive strategy.
\nMarketing's job is to create awareness, generate interest and manufacture desire. Sales' job is conversion: stimulating that interest and leveraging that desire to close the deal. One's upstream, one's downstream – but if they rarely compare notes your business will start bleeding revenue.
\nTo use a bowling analogy, your marketing team is the machine that sets up the pins, and your sales team are the high rollers who consistently knock 'em down.
\nLeft to their own devices, your marketing team will gladly waste all your time and money on over-indulgent vanity projects.
\nThe generally fall into two main categories, the wanna-be creatives, and the analytics junkies.
\nThe wanna-be creatives think they're Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg rolled into one. When they're not wasting hours making pretty slide decks they're obsessing over the brand; yeah but the brand, what about the brand? I really think it's time for a fresh new rebrand! Turns out kind who think Helvetica font in white on a charcoal background makes a \"bold statement\" and are happy to pay an agency 20k for the privilege.
\nAnalytics junkies love nothing more than dithering around with dashboards, obsessing over metrics instead of helping to drive sales.
\nImpressions, CTRs, engagement rates, these metrics only matter if you're seeing actual conversions. And if your team is more concerned with vanity metrics than actual sales that's a huge red flag.
\nSimilarly, if all their communications are aimed at customer profiles or avatars which have nothing in common with the people your sales team talk to on a daily basis, you have a serious alignment issue on your hands.
\nThe industry numbers back the shape of the problem even where they don't name it: only around 8% of companies say their sales and marketing teams are genuinely aligned.
\nYour marketing team needs to be getting direct front-line info from your sales team. That means the actual words a prospect used on a call, the objection that keeps resurfacing, the line that made someone finally say yes. No dashboard has ever captured that. A salesperson hears it daily, and nobody ever thinks to ask.
\nSales has the mirror-image disease. Ask a rep why a deal closed and you'll get instinct and swagger, wrapped up in \"I just read the room.\" That's the sales equivalent of a magician who won't explain the trick. Fine. But are your sales team representing the brand correctly, do they understand their customers, do they have access to customer profiles and customer data, if not, then why not?
\nA rep running on pure gut is flying blind past everything marketing already knows about that exact customer. Worse, they're free-styling a pitch that flatly contradicts the ad the prospect clicked on three weeks earlier.
\nA hungry sales person will do anything to close the deal, up to and including undermining your company's image, brand and core messaging.
\nAfter all, who has time for all that \"marketing crap\" when they're out in the field?
\nThe sale is all that matters, they'll tell, you, but then what else do you expect a sales person to say?
\nIn fact, there's a strong chance your sales team likely thinks your marketing team doesn't really do anything. And who knows they might be right.
\nDo they also drive sales? If no, then what are you paying them for? Feeling blessed on LinkedIn? Making pretty pictures in Canva? Because iyour marketing team can't show a clear conversion path from top to bottom of the funnel something's seriously wrong.
\nIt's about the two extremes. Some companies mash sales and marketing under one roof, often under the same dozy middle manager, and call the resulting fog \"alignment.\" Others swing the other way and wall them off completely: a sales team that's only focussed on conversions, a marketing team obsessed with vanity metrics, each one convinced the other is dead weight.
\nBoth extremes fail for the same reason. They remove the friction two genuinely different jobs are supposed to have, instead of managing it on purpose.
\nThe evidence isn't subtle. Companies that keep the two jobs distinct but properly connected consistently out-earn the ones that let them drift into separate silos. The gap shows up in growth rate and deal velocity, not in how tidy the org chart looks.
\nHarmonizing both the smart way will mean higher results from less effort. But you gotta know how to do it right. That means keeping the jobs separate and building one deliberate bridge between them, not knocking the wall down and hoping nobody notices the rubble.
\nStop hiring for \"sales and marketing\" like it's one skill in a trench coat. Hire a marketer who can manufacture demand. Hire a salesperson who can close it. Then get the two of them in a room together once a month. Last Friday, not another status call bolted onto an already-dying calendar. No deck, no dashboard. Just both teams comparing notes on what actually happened out there. Put it at 4pm, add pizza, and watch \"mandatory sync\" turn into the one Friday nobody skips.
\nDo that, and the \"who actually drives revenue\" argument stops being a turf war and starts being a shared job description.
", "author": { "name": "DWM" }, "tags": [ ], "date_published": "2026-09-07T15:29:27+01:00", "date_modified": "2026-09-13T21:26:14+01:00" } ] }