It’s like marriage: sales and marketing are linked for life in a relationship with common goals but sometimes don’t see eye to eye. As a salesman, I couldn’t understand how marketing could be so unresponsive to perfectly reasonable requests. Later, as a marketer, I suddenly saw the sales force as a bunch of prima donnas, expecting everyone to jump through hoops to deliver impossible results overnight.

The problem is that marketing runs on the organization’s timetable, while salespeople often have to operate on customers’ schedules. And while sales does bring in the orders that pay everyone’s salaries, they depend on marketing to provide the tools. And when too many of your tools are last-minute special orders, you end up with $400 hammers.

The more reactive marketing becomes, the fewer resources are left for critical strategic activities. As a result, sales and marketing both end up operating in crisis mode, cost of sales climbs, revenues fall, and margins shrink. Unfortunately, it’s a hard cycle to break. As they say, when you’re butt-deep in alligators it’s hard to focus on draining the swamp.

The solution is a corporate version of marriage counseling. sales has to take the time to articulate their processes and define their needs. Marketing needs to understand and internalize the sales process enough to become proactive. It necessary, a third party can help facilitate the process so it doesn’t impact ongoing sales or marketing operations.

The goal is a marketing operation that can work with product management to anticipate the needs of the sales force, have the bandwidth to meet any remaining needs that arise unexpectedly, and still focus on ongoing operations and strategic planning. Sales and marketing will always come from different planets, but their interaction can be, like the solar system, orderly and self-sustaining.