Day-to-day experience in working with, and sometimes tripping over, their own company's sales professionals has given product marketers a number of practical insights for bringing the two functions closer together. These are some of the useful tips PSN members shared in a recent Roundtable meeting.

• Become omniscient.  Marketing should know everything about Sales and sales tools.  Whenever practical, assign a representative from Marketing to sit in on sales calls.
• Make friends.  Marketing people should find ways to cultivate relationships with their counterparts in Sales.  Crash their parties, if that's what it takes.
• Be patient.  It takes a new sales person anywhere from six to eight months to learn their product, their company, and their craft.  Give them time to climb the learning curve. 
• Step back.  Sales people don't appreciate having Marketing trying to micromanage their work.  Check to see whether their execution of sales is actually mapping into the Marketing plan.
• Seek leadership.  The vice presidents of sales and marketing are well-positioned to break down any institutional walls between their two functions.  Solicit their help in creating openings.
• Draw a map.  Marketing people should try to map out the Sales process in sufficient detail to really understand it and to know what support the Sales person needs, when they need it, and why.
• Promote process.  Be careful about promoting star sales people into sales management positions.  For one thing, it removes a key sales person from the field - someone who may represent a disproportionately large share of your company's total sales.  And second, many top sales people are antagonistic to formal sales processes and operate intuitively; they may not be able to teach others how to replicate their own success. 
• Train together.  Train you new sales reps and Marketing staff together in learning the Sales process.  Help both Marketing and Sales people to understand the customer's issues and their points of resistance.
• Look back.  At the conclusion of a sales process - whether it was successful or not - conduct a retrospective analysis to better understand what worked and what didn't.
• Track progress.  Conduct pipeline management; make sure you understand which customers and sales reps are at what stages of the sales process.  Calibrate expectations accordingly.
• Set priorities.  Where a company has multiple sales processes in place, Marketing should prioritize which ones it will be able to support and make those priorities clear to Sales.
• Open up communications.  Consider organizing a Lunch ‘n Learn series led by different unit managers and making attendance mandatory for both Sales and Marketing staff.
• Meet needs.  If a supplier doesn't meet certain critical customer business needs, the deal will die and nothing else will matter.  Understand which constituency you are dealing with and what their critical issues are.
• Create tools.  Marketing has a responsibility to build Sales tools that can be used consistently by everyone in the sales force; it should try to keep individual sales people from creating their own tools.
• Get buy-in.  If Marketing can create Sales tools that the company's best sales person adopts and uses successfully, the rest of the sales force will follow.
• Accept brochure limitations.  Brochures themselves don't make sales; they should position your sales rep to make the sale.  Don't attempt to do everything with a product brochure.
• Indulge Prima donnas.  Treat sales superstars respectfully, and recognize that they may have valid points about necessary Sales tools.  But know too that they can throw the rest of your Sales organization seriously off track
• Defer judgment.  Don't judge your sales team's prowess solely on initial sales of new technology products; they may want to be evaluated on the basis of early successes, but those results tend to reflect early adopters who can visualize the product's applications for themselves.  Instead, judge your sales force effectiveness on the post-chasm mainstream market, where people will need help from your sales team in understanding your product's value.

Integrating Marketing with Sales series

This Quick Tip is one of a series on offering tips on how to improve the integration of marketing with sales.

• Act respectfully
• Think conversationally
• Tested tactics of your peers