The Different Types of Sales & Marketing Relationships

In today's competitive environment, for your business to remain relevant, business leaders must seamlessly integrate their sales and marketing functions.

Effective sales and marketing are two success factors in today's competitive business landscape. However, sales and marketing have many different relationship categories: adversarial, subservient, and siloed. Whatever your business strategy, marketing fuels business growth. Whether you're marketing a service, product, or something in between, you need a tech-savvy, efficient, and integrated strategy to drive positive results.

• Adversarial: A rather unfortunate relationship between your company's sales and marketing functions is called adversarial, in which one or the other is forced to fight for resources and leadership. An antagonistic relationship can happen when unhealthy competitiveness is rooted in your organization's culture. As a result, it can be hard to diagnose and eliminate specific barriers that cause stunted growth.
  

• Subservient or Siloed: On the other hand, a subservient relationship between your sales and marketing can be just as damaging. With this dynamic type, marketing acts solely as sales support and does not drive the business forward. This type of relationship results from companies making the common mistake of underinvesting and being stuck in an era when people thought marketing wasn't essential. However, today we understand more than ever that marketing should never be an afterthought. 

A company needs to learn how to effectively communicate its marketing goals. Strategies like brand strategy, digital advertising, and marketing automation shouldn't feel out of reach, nor should sales be chosen over marketing. Instead, the two should co-exist and work together.

Today, companies need these two branches of their business to share a common understanding of growth, key performance indicators (KPIs), a strategic plan, and effective communication.

As members of the Worldcom network, we have quick and unfettered access to the resources of more than 80 global partners across 49 countries and six continents, enabling us to work together in designing and implementing marketing communications strategies for all key stakeholders.

Contact us to discover how our communications advisors can benefit your business.

*This article was originally published by the Worldcom partner in Missouri, Standing Partnership. It is reprinted with permission.