If we draw an analogy between a human organism and a business, sales clearly represent the oxygen without which a business cannot exist. It can hold its breath for a few minutes, it can even breathe polluted air for a while, but once the oxygen disappears for too long, the life of that business is in danger. Of course, in this story we can also include the oxygen tanks supplied by banks, but if our business doesn’t get back on its feet quickly, the banks will just as quickly remove those tanks. Continuing the analogy, if sales are the oxygen of a business, what is marketing? Can a business live without marketing? I believe there are certain industries where businesses truly can live without marketing, and that would be an interesting subject for another article. Returning to our analogy, I think marketing becomes a necessity when the market our organism lives in is crowded and oxygen becomes a limited resource. Practically speaking, in this context marketing can be defined as a business’s ability to breathe as much oxygen as its organism needs. In plain terms, it’s a business’s ability to elbow its way to a larger gulp of oxygen, and that ability becomes ever more important when there are other organisms around doing the same. Those who develop this ability and become very good at it can use it to grow their organism; others can keep it at a middling level and get by just fine; others may suffocate. Of course, the situation is far more complex than that and varies by industry, and by the type of product or service a business offers.
Moving further along the storyline, the issue I want to discuss in this article is a dysfunction that occurs inside many companies between the sales function and the marketing function. In theory, and most often also in practice, sales is responsible for bringing revenue into the company today, tomorrow, next week, and next year, usually prioritizing the moment closest to the present. As an entrepreneur, I understand this need, because salaries, taxes, and suppliers typically must be paid as agreed. Marketing, on the other hand, although it was born with the role I described above, tends to look at a series of other indicators that are not visible or felt in sales today. Marketers are generally interested in perception, exposure, and positioning, elements that should, in fact, facilitate continuous sales growth. The dysfunction I’ve encountered several times in my career, and still see occasionally with our clients, can be summarized as follows: the sales department posts weak results, while the marketing department posts excellent results, by the terms described above. How is it possible for a business to be superbly positioned, enjoy massive visibility, generate lots of leads, and yet have very poor sales results?
Allow me to offer a concrete example from the auto industry. We have a car dealership that sells, let’s say, Aro vehicles. It’s the end of October in Q4, and our dealership’s annual sales plan still needs 30 more cars sold to hit the yearly target of 100. In short, this means that if our dealer doesn’t sell those cars, the inventory will remain stuck, will generate costs and a possible cash-flow crunch, and revenues won’t be there to pay employees and suppliers and to end the year profitably. In short, the problem is as serious as it gets. In that same dealership, the marketing department is celebrating new records each month for online reach, exposure at interesting events, number of leads generated, and showroom traffic. Yet with two months left in the year, 30% of the planned volume is missing, and marketing’s pistons have hit the rev limiter. And as if things weren’t difficult enough already, if we put the two departments, marketing and sales, in the same room, marketing might say they’ve done their job but sales can’t perform, while sales will insist that marketing is doing nothing and the leads they get are very poor. What should we do? How do we solve this situation?
The solution can be quite simple if you’re able to look at the context through a “big-picture” lens, or it can become increasingly complicated the more you cling to the preconceptions of one side or the other. Sure, each department can use that lens, but most likely it’s a manager overseeing both who will. To solve the problem of missing sales, it’s important to identify the root cause that created this perception gap between the two departments. It’s crucial to find out why marketing believes it’s doing a superb job while sales isn’t bringing in revenue. In my brief experience so far, I’ve seen a few causes in action, which I’ll recap below.
- Communication between the two departments doesn’t exist, or it’s poor and doesn’t facilitate collaboration. Obvious, right? You might be surprised how little “obvious” there is in practice when people’s egos get involved. Everyone forgets the team’s common goal, and each camp begins to passionately defend its own hypothesis as the correct one. And after the war ends and a winner is declared, both sides realize they’ve only wasted time arguing without finding a concrete solution. As Professor Dumitru Borțun once told us in a course: “The truth is neither mine nor yours, and it isn’t in the middle either. The truth is always above.” Once the entire team understands there’s a communication deficiency between the two functions, things can start to heal. What matters is that both teams reach a point where they actively listen to what the partner team has to say. Only then, calmly, can the deep causes of poor performance be identified and countered with a new set of actions, this time synchronized and planned from the outset toward a shared final goal.
- A lack of understanding of each department’s role can also be a cause. Even if people are friends and get along well, if marketing believes its job is to generate views and leads for the brand, and that’s it, we have a problem. We also have a problem when the sales department thinks “those marketing folks” have no idea what it means to sell, yet still chooses not to communicate anything that might help them. These perceptions are certainly shaped by the company’s management style. If marketing indicators are the only ones tracked for that department, without factoring in sales, we have a problem; and if sales doesn’t contribute concrete insights and information to the communication process, we also have a problem. When both departments understand that their purpose is to collaborate in order to maximize the return on effort, decisions gradually get much better.
- An overly large gap in status between the two departments inside the company can also be a cause. As mentioned above, sales is usually seen as the most important department, while marketing is viewed as a secondary, support function for sales. That positioning wouldn’t be an issue if the sales director understood how marketing works. Many times, a sales director may not have that knowledge; and by the power granted by the org chart, they may routinely silence the marketing department, generally regarding it as a department that squanders the money they bring in. Believe me, I’m not speaking from books, I’ve seen such situations, more than once. In this context, the two causes above simply cannot be solved because the internal power dynamics block any resolution. Here, the solution would be to recognize the importance of the support department and to encourage the exchange of information.
- Inertia or routine, manifesting as reluctance to change how things get done. This can affect both departments. By slowly settling into a certain way of doing things, the neighboring departments can reach a point where marketing campaigns previously run according to a certain pattern simply no longer deliver sales results, or the sales process itself stops producing, no matter what marketing does to bring in customers. Even if there is communication, clarity on roles, and enough room to maneuver, as long as people lack the courage to change how they work, improvements won’t appear anytime soon. This cause can be addressed only by a leader respected by both departments, someone who can challenge people while also providing a safety net.
- The market, competition, and consumer behavior, together or separately, can also be causes of the problem defined above. These causes are extrinsic, not directly under the control of either department, and are a bit more difficult to address. Even so, to adapt how both marketing and sales work, you need to remove all the internal causes above. In short, neighboring departments need to communicate and collaborate, know their roles very clearly, be agile rather than stuck in old habits, and, certainly, they need courageous leaders who make decisions based on the incomplete information they have available. The speed of implementing changes is becoming increasingly important in today’s competitive business environment.
Returning to our Aro dealership, assuming we identify all five causes described above, how might we proceed to solve our problem? Here’s what I would do: I would bring the leaders of both departments to the same table and carefully explain the role each plays, emphasizing that without close collaboration we have no chance of success. Next, I’d dig a little deeper to uncover the narratives and emotions that fuel their reluctance to collaborate, bringing everything to light. After making sure I’ve removed the root of the rivalry, I’d move on to stimulating the exchange of information between the two departments in line with the agreed roles. Ideally, things would happen instantly, but that’s impossible. Most likely, it will take a bit more insistence for the leaders of both departments to transmit the new positioning to every team member. Once I achieve a satisfactory level of collaboration between the two functions, I’ll start analyzing how well they adopt new procedures and processes, taking inspiration from the changes I see in the market, either among competitors or consumers. Ideally, I would launch adjacent challenges for both departments so that they reach the conclusion on their own that they’ve remained stuck in the past. A “Do it because I said so” approach may not generate the expected results. For change to be deep and lasting, I believe the leader needs to stimulate certain behaviors, not issue detailed orders. Thus, in a context where we bring our personal issues to the table to resolve them; then understand that together we are better; and then constantly seek to change how we work to adapt to ever-changing markets and diverse customer behaviors, only then can we say we’ll no longer see gaps between the results of marketing and those of sales. At that point actions will be coordinated, efficient, and aligned with the market.
Of course, when you write a blog post about past situations, things seem extremely simple, just like the old saying: “Many heroes appear after the war.” In reality, the process I’ve described above is full of pitfalls, even if the direction is correct. The deepest trap in the situation I’ve described is the short term. In such situations, many leaders are likely thinking about how to solve the issue tactically, i.e., sell 30 cars in two months. I don’t know how many will have the patience to analyze, look for causes, and start removing them. Naturally, action to solve the short-term problem doesn’t exclude action to solve the deeper, long-term problem, but typically, leaders act like firefighters who prefer to deal with what’s “on fire,” the things that only they, by virtue of their power, can resolve. The deeper issues that haven’t yet erupted, though important, tend to be left alone to ripen until they too become urgent. Again, I’m not speaking from books, but from my brief experience. With the big-picture lens, if you look at your activity at year-end, how many important things did you resolve during the year before they became urgent? I think that can be a pretty good indicator of a manager’s or leader’s maturity.
Another trap to watch for is the trap of emotions, first your own, then those of the people you work with. It’s very possible that things won’t go as I’ve written here; you may get angry and want to quit, or punish people. My friendly advice is to get very angry and then recover quickly, without making any decisions. Decisions made against an emotional backdrop of this type usually just waste your time; at the end of the emotional episode, you’ll end up right where you started. The same applies to the people you work with, especially when you pull them out of their routine or their beliefs; you may bruise a few egos. Again, help them process their emotions; otherwise they too will waste time and stay exactly where they are, or worse, they may sabotage the entire process.
In conclusion, when marketing declares itself “brilliant” but sales can’t breathe, the problem isn’t one department or the other, it’s the systemic rupture between them: different objectives, different metrics, unevenly distributed power, and process inertia, all within a constantly changing market. The antidote is a shared operating mechanism: the same map of objectives, the same success indicators measured together, and the same working cadence with a strong emphasis on collaboration. When the conversation shifts from “who’s at fault” to “what we’re changing in the process,” the organism breathes again: marketing brings the right oxygen, and sales turns it into energy. Thus, over the long term, you build a growth engine that adapts to the market on its own.
