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Escaping the Black Hole

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Escaping the Black Hole

Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing-Sales Disconnect

Thomson South-Western,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

When the marketing department begins feuding with sales, it means trouble. Learn how to become a peacemaker.

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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Sales and marketing are critical departments in any corporation, but they never seem to work together very well. Author Robert Schmonsees explains why this happens, especially in the business-to-business sector. However, his blueprint for correcting sales/marketing "disconnects" is somewhat swamped by his writing style, which is full of repetitive prose and industry jargon. Eager to describe and elaborate on various problems and solutions, he tends to overuse numbered lists and circular flow charts. In fact, he sometimes enumerates good techniques for correcting a problem and returns to the same issue in a later chapter. Pulling such concepts together would have aided his argument. Thus, the worthwhile ideas in the book are challenging to put into practice. getAbstract believes that’s unfortunate, because the author’s insights are helpful, and a more systematic approach might have made them more accessible. Patient readers will find this book useful.

Summary

Bridging the Gap

Sales and marketing used to be linked, but over the past 20 years the gap between these two critical operations has increased. Today, the sales and marketing departments of companies that sell complex products and services often are disconnected completely from one another and fail to cross-communicate even their most basic needs.

This may explain why:

  • Half of all salespeople do not meet their sales quotas.
  • More than 74% of all new product introductions fall short of their projected goals.
  • About 90% of companies do not meet their sales forecasts.

The sales and marketing functions in companies that cater to the business-to-business (b-to-b) market are particularly dysfunctional. No one paid attention to this growing problem during the 1990s, because the decade’s powerful economy compensated for these deficiencies. In addition, during this period companies focused on selling products rather than on building long-term relationships with customers.

Marketing departments fell into the practice of building their campaigns from the inside out. Instead of starting with documented customer needs, ...

About the Author

Robert J. Schmonsees is a marketing and sales executive with 35 years of experience building and running both start-ups and large, publicly traded high-tech companies.

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