By Jim Berkowitz, CRM Mastery

In the point-counterpoint article, Truce! Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing (MarketingProfs, needs a subscription), the two debating authors work for Ciena; Bill Koss is vice-president of global alliance partners, and Bill Rozier is vice president of global marketing.

Together, theses two gentlemen have built a progressive marketing and sales system that seems to have eliminated much of the typical animosity between sales and marketing. This article, discusses how that happened. But, first, Bill Babcock, the CEO of Babcock & Jenkins, a direct and relationship marketing agency gives a little background information. Here are several excerpts:

Bill Babcock: Most companies we know of have a serious problem: Sales hates marketing, and marketing despises sales. Marketing is having great success generating leads and uncovering opportunity. But sales has no respect for what marketing accomplishes. They take leads grudgingly and when the leads turn into real opportunities they claim those opportunities were already on their radar.

There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between these teams—they have separate goals, separate cultures, and different fears and motivations.

Sales folks make quota or they are gone. They spend their day dealing with rejection and sweating their numbers. Marketing people never feel this constant pressure. When they skip in with a fistful of prospects and say, "I've just made your job easy—go sell to all these hot leads," the sales force wants to kill them.

On the other hand, sales has no detectable foresight. They undercut marketing even when they are getting leads that will make their quota next quarter or next year. Marketing initiates marketing conversations that turn to sales conversations, and when they do, sales gives them NO credit—no matter how overwhelming the accountability evidence might be. Sales cares only about what is happening this quarter and what marketing did for sales today. But marketing has to look further into the future.

We see our clients struggle to bring these teams together. I've always believed that it can be done, but it's a painful partnership. It's like the Brits and the Yanks teaming up in World War II. They didn't necessarily like each other and they didn't hang out together and sing Kumbaya, but they knew the competition was deadly and they were doomed if they didn't work together, so they got the job done.

That seems like the best you can hope for.

Ciena looks to be an exception. From the outside, it seems that you and your teams have solved some of these problems. Is that true, or am I just seeing the public face?

The discussion that follows in this article is very informative and well worth the read. Here is just a very brief sample of some of the comments:

Bill Koss (Sales): I think one of the reasons I get along so well with Rozier and his team is that I love leads. I believe in leads. I want a lead-generating machine.

Still, the wrong kind of lead is a huge waste of time for our sales team, and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. That leads sales management to reject leads wholesale—I know many of my peers at other companies don't share my fondness for leads.

Bill Rozier (Marketing): we can get customers to "raise their hand" and to "want" to talk to a salesperson. The days of handing off "T-shirt grabbers" at tradeshows as a lead are over, and I'm not completely sure the sales team understands that change has taken place.

Despite all that, your perception that we have managed to declare a truce is basically correct. There's a cultural chasm between our two teams, but we've found plenty of ways to bridge it.

First and foremost, we take our field direction from sales. I think that's a huge change here. And for their part, sales helps us with some of the heavy lifting of field-marketing programs.

Bill Rozier (Marketing): Great sales people make us better at marketing because they teach us how to carry on a dialog with customers that's more appropriate and actionable. What we need to do is continually get closer to the sales force. Create a strong bond between us. Work together. Focus on objectives we can both succeed at. I see the value in that and so do our senior executives.

Bill Babcock: The sales force wants to talk to the most senior decision makers who are ready to buy in the next quarter and have budget established. They expect you to go find those kinds of opportunities—but they don't exist in useful quantities. If you get every lead that meets those criteria for a complex and expensive product, the sales force will either already know all about the opportunity or it's too late to get on the short list.

You have to grow those opportunities, not just harvest the tiny number that just happen to already be there. Your focus really needs to be on feeding a cultivation engine.

The key to effective cultivation is a very simple and easy way to move leads around and see what's happening to them. Otherwise, any lead that is not quite ready falls to the bottom of your sales force automation system and dies, when all it really needed was to go back into active cultivation.

If you have a CRM system in place, you can generally accomplish this with some minor effort. If not, or if your sales force consists mostly of resellers or partners, then a Lead Management System like the one we built for Ciena is necessary. You need an easy way to get leads into the right hands automatically, a way for them to report on whether they have accepted or rejected the lead, and, if they accepted the lead, what the disposition eventually was—won, lost, or not really a lead.

And there needs to be a way to evaluate rejected leads and perhaps turn them over to a different rep.

It takes some time to get the process really cooking, and you need to make sure that the sales force understands what you're doing and why. They have to see some great leads come out of the process. But, yes, it will end the war, or at least they'll stop biting the hand that feeds them.

You folks already have the top-down cooperation—your truce is real. This approach will give you bottom-up cooperation as well, and should make for a world-class operation.