There’s been a lot written and spoken about the relationship between marketing and sales. Too often, this relationship amounts to a battle for supremacy within a company with each side pursuing goals mostly unrelated to the other. To solve the problem, some people suggest merging the roles. In fact, sometimes sales does marketing and marketing does sales. It’s not efficient, but it can work. And, in smaller organizations, the sales and marketing roles might be performed by the same person. There are also confusing org charts where the marketing people report to the VP of Sales or vice versa. All in all, sales and marketing are often thought of as roughly the same activity. A good first step in better alignment is to better distinguish the roles. Not so much because of traditional divisions but because of efficiency of action. Most know what sales is. Chances are most don’t know how marketing fits into this (or how it should). Marketing is art of communicating with a mass or anonymous audience in a non-selling capacity, typically to build awareness and start relationships. (You might have heard about one-to-one marketing. That’s a topic for another time.) Sales is the art of engaging clients to do work. So, you really could have one without the other. My approach is to make sure that both “departments” are subject to the true leader---the customer. And to be honest, sales has a big advantage here. One thing that I constantly have to remind marketing people about is that the goal of the company is not to develop brand awareness for its own sake. Rather, the goal is to add, satisfy, and retain customers. Based on this clarification of roles, the most customer-centered functions for marketing are brand awareness, lead generation/nurturing, and sales support.