Six Sigma Blog: Creating A Connect Between Sales And Marketing

January 04, 2007

Creating A Connect Between Sales And Marketing

By Priya Jestin, Staff Writer

Even a rookie in the sales and marketing industry understands the co-relation between sales and marketing and how the quality of collaboration between sales and marketing directly impacts a company’s return on investment. And yet, there is a lot of hush-hush work that goes on in the sales process. In most organizations, only the sales team is privy to the actual creaking of the wheels that occur before a proposal or a sale happens.

And what’s worse? Most of these meetings are so private; very few people ever get to know what happens during the process. This means the marketing team has it doubly difficult. They are forced gauge the market and measure their revenue contribution, and lead generation ROI without any idea of why the sales team has decided to opt a certain method of operation. This leads to quite a bit of lost revenue for the firm.

The easiest way to rectify this problem is through process mapping. This technique helps create a common vision and shared language for improving business results. Next time, we’ll see how we can use the six sigma way to improve the communication flow between the two departments.

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January 4, 2007 in Corporate | Permalink

Comments

I am just finishing a book review for Mitchell Gooze who's book is coming out in the near future. The book is called Value Acceleration. He makes the same point and several others using Manufacturing Models (Lean, Theory of Constraints, Continuous improvement) applied to the Sales and Marketing arena. I have interviewed Mitchell for my Podcast previously and will have him back on the show around the 26th. I think that the book and your point above is really what is needed in sales and marketing. We need to move this to a process rather than an art form. (remember back when manufacturing was a craft? remember how far we have come since then?)

Posted by: Ken Rayment | Jan 18, 2007 5:36:38 AM

I work exclusively with marketing leaders helping them apply Lean Six Sigma methodologies in order to improve marketing processes. The reality is that these processes are in most cases 20 years old, and have never been measured. I like to to refer to it as “the last place in a modern corporation where you can still see the art of hand crafted business processes." The good news is that the cost savings, and efficiency gains are enormous.

Posted by: Darrin Lord | Feb 15, 2007 2:38:28 PM