This is an important post. The reason is that this problem has been inhibiting sales productivity for decades.

Marketing leaders who have no respect for the sales function or for people that sell will not align with them, no matter how many workshops they attend or diversity approaches are taken. By the way, I recommend to CEOs that they strongly consider hiring marketing leaders that have successfully sold at some time in their careers. It’s not required, but it sure helps.

Sales understands that they serve the customer. Their job is to help people buy. To do that, they need ongoing support from marketing. Just to set the record straight, sales is accountable to marketing as well. Sales has a responsibility to follow marketing’s direction regarding product positioning and target markets, among other things. They must also provide feedback on what they observe in the field-industry trends, what the competition is doing, how customers doing, as well as providing useful feedback about the quality of leads being passed to them.

Sales leaders who believe that “people who can’t sell become marketers” will not likely ever find themselves in the enviable position of working for an industry leading company. Asking carefully designed questions of sales leader candidates about their experiences working with marketing can mitigate some of these risks.

So you see, we aren’t going to fix this at the VP of Marketing or VP of Sales level. The solution lies with those who hire these people.