Sales and Marketing Aren’t Separate Jobs (Especially Early On)

There’s a common way we think about sales and marketing that causes real problems,, especially in early-stage companies: We tend to treat them as separate functions. Marketing’s job is to come up with strategy and create materials: copy, visuals, stories meant to attract a prospect’s attention. Sales then picks up from there, talks to prospects, and eventually tries to close the deal.

The mistake is putting an iron wall between the two. Sales and marketing aren’t separate activities. They’re part of a single continuum.

Salespeople are having real conversations with prospects. They start to understand the actual business problems people are dealing with. But too often, that information doesn't makes it back to marketing in any formal way.

So marketing fills in the gaps. Copy gets written based on assumptions about what prospects care about. Sometimes it works. But when it doesn’t, marketing gets blamed for an ineffective campaign. Sales then gets frustrated because the leads “aren’t good.” Marketing gets frustrated because the messaging “should have worked.”

In early-stage companies (and actually, in most companies) sales and marketing work best when they feed each other. Sales conversations should inform marketing language. Marketing experiments should inform sales conversations.

That’s why, especially as you get started, I don’t think of sales and marketing as separate roles. They’re two parts of the same process: figuring out what problem you’re actually solving for your customer, and how they talk about it when they are ready to make a change.