Sales is essential, Marketing is not.

Marketing folk continue to throw brickbats at sales pros. The latest salvo came from BNET's new PR blogger Travis Van, whose post Bad Marketing Follows Bad Sales trots out the traditional complaints. According to Van, many (if not most) sales pros are:

• Uncommunicative. They "spend so much time on the fuzzy voodoo of assigning closing probabilities for each deal in the funnel, yet spend zero time sharing feedback with marketing."
• Shortsighted. They're "primarily driven to meet their individual quotas, and secondarily concerned with the overall sales success of the company."
• Ignorant. They "have an extremely limited knowledge of the intricacies of the product or the features that distinguish it from the competitors' products."
• Illiterate. They "are incredibly poor communicators ... email correspondences with customers riddled with grammar and spelling errors."

It is true that sales pros are generally uncommunicative when dealing with marketing folk. The reason is simple. Selling is like sex; until you've actually done it, you can't possibly understand what the fuss is all about. Most marketers have never worked in Sales, have business degrees that didn't include a course in selling, have only the vaguest idea of what selling is like, and (to make matters worse) have contempt towards sales reps and the sales process. As a result, talking about sales with your typical marketer is like discussing intercourse with a celibate priest. It tends to be embarrassing rather than enlightening.

It is true that sales pros are indeed driven to meet their individual quotas. That's because they don't get paid and will eventually be fired if they don't make their quotas. (It amazes me that I have to point this out.) Expecting sales reps to be more concerned with the "overall sales success of the company" than with their quotas is essentially asking them to take a voluntary pay cut to help the rest of the company. Is Marketing ever asked to make a similar sacrifice? Of course not. Marketers would scream bloody murder if you asked them to dock their pay in order to help "overall success."

It is true that sales pros frequently do not have detailed product knowledge. That's because such knowledge is surprisingly useless. Marketing wrongly thinks that product features are important to customers. They're not. Customers don't care about features. Customers' eyes glaze over when sales reps start talking about features. Customers care about: 1) their problem, and 2) whether you can be trusted to solve their problem. Sometimes product features play a role in creating that trust. More often, features are background noise and the decision is made based on your firm's track record of solving similar problems.

It's absolutely untrue that many sales reps are poor communicators. Sales reps that can't communicate well with customers don't close business and quickly get canned. The connection between performance and reward is very tight in the world of sales. If you don't or can't sell, you're out the door. By contrast, marketers who send out ridiculous press releases or waste money on useless marketing materials are seldom fired, because they're not being measured on anything quantifiable. They've got the system jiggered so that they can steal the credit if sales are up ("we've been driving business with our marketing programs") and deflect blame if sales are down ("those sales guys didn't give out enough of our brochures").

Ultimately, the great debate between Sales and Marketing is absurd, because it's a fight that Marketing can't win. Sales is essential; Marketing is not. If a company has a sales force that can't sell, it goes out of business tout suite. But most B2B companies could lose most of their marketers and be no worse off than before. Sorry, but it's the truth.

This is not to say that Marketing couldn't be useful. Quite the contrary. The things that Marketing is supposed to be doing, like lead generation and demand creation, are important. However, Marketing can't perform those functions adequately until 1) they're being measured on something quantifiable and fired if they don't deliver, and 2) the personnel working inside Marketing have sold for a living and thus possess the requisite understanding to add some value to the sales process.