The Fundamental Breakdown Between Sales and Marketing, with Sean Shannon, Strategic Growth Design (One Minute Interview, Episode 128)
Sean Shannon: The fundamental breakdown between sales and marketing, as I have seen it in my time, is an understanding of the ideal customer profile.
In other words, marketing oftentimes is providing leads to the sales team that are of no use to them because marketing doesn’t understand what the sales ideal client profile is. And sales is guilty in that because they have not fed to marketing what that looks like. Peter Drucker’s famous for saying that the vast majority of businesses have no idea what their customers are buying.
They know what they’re selling to them, but they don’t know why the customers are buying it and for what use. And so I like to approach my, my, when I start to talk about value proposition with sales and marketing teams, I like to talk about the idea that we don’t necessarily buy products and services as much as we hire them to do jobs for us in our lives.
And if we can untangle what that job is, that whatever product or service we’re selling is that the customer’s hiring it to do for them in their business, we’re going to end up with an alignment between sales and marketing of both understand what that job is.
Listen to Sean’s full ProfitSense with Bill McDermott interview here.
Sean Shannon, Strategic Growth Design
Sean Shannon is the President of Strategic Growth Design.
Strategic Growth Design helps small and medium-sized businesses and start-ups chart a path to sustainable growth through thoughtful strategy and disciplined processes. Sales is the engine that drives growth, and yet little thought is given to the infrastructure that’s necessary to create repeatable success.
SGD offers business owners and CEOs the opportunity to engage on a project basis or as fractional sales leadership, all driven by the needs of the organization. Some simply need the processes; others need the leadership only years of experience can bring on an interim basis. The pros at Strategic Growth Design are ready to roll their sleeves up and get to work driving revenue north and mental anguish south.
The “One Minute Interview” series is produced by John Ray and the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® in Alpharetta. You can find the full archive of shows by following this link.
Renasant Bank has humble roots, starting in 1904 as a $100,000 bank in a Lee County, Mississippi, bakery. Since then, Renasant has grown to become one of the Southeast’s strongest financial institutions, with over $13 billion in assets and more than 190 banking, lending, wealth management, and financial services offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. All of Renasant’s success stems from each of their banker’s commitment to investing in their communities as a way of better understanding the people they serve. At Renasant Bank, they understand you because they work and live alongside you every day.
