Brian Carroll, author of the B2B Lead Generation Blog, has a recent post on the need to improve teamwork between sales and marketing. He discusses the use of frequent and more effective meetings -- he calls them "huddles" -- as one powerful way to foster communication and collaboration. He also lists 35 other possibilities for increasing the cooperating between these groups.
I'd like to add one of my own: Creating shared goals and rewards.
Too often, job goals and incentive plans -- particularly for sales positions -- focus exclusively on individual accomplishments. Case in point would be the classic sales commission plan which rewards sales revenues or volume generated by the individual salesperson. Whiles these plans can have some obvious benefits, they also tend to work at cross purposes with any efforts to foster collaboration, even just among the sales staff.
If improving sales and marketing teamwork is an important objective for your organization, consider establishing at least one shared goal for these groups; something that the sales and marketing staff must work together to achieve. Then tie a piece of everyone's compensation to this accomplishment.
Reward design alone will not create collaboration without the benefit of other efforts and activities; however, they have the ability to throw a serious wrench into these initiatives if they are putting out conflicting messages. Even those of us with the best of intentions find it difficult to ignore the messages that are directly wired to our paychecks.
Comments