Can One Person Handle Both Marketing and Sales Areas?

by Paulina Romero H Paulina Romero H | Apr 3, 2019 11:00:00 AM

This is the one million dollar question and there is no easy answer to it. Because of course, it depends a lot on the person in question. Both Marketing and sales must work together within an Inbound strategy, that's true; Smarketing is one of the pillars of the inbound methodology. But, does this mean that one person can do both? Or what exactly does this mean?

Smarketing

One step at a time: smarketing does mean having sales (sales) and marketing (hence "Smarketing") working together, so it actually mean that these two teams (or two people if the company is small) should work together. I means that even if each area carries out different tasks, they should both:

  • Plan their objectives together
  • Design strategies together
  • Evaluate the process and success (or failure) of their campaigns together
  • Understand that the person who comes to our website goes through a whole sales process in which he goes from a simple and curious visitor, to a convinced buyer of our product or service and that, in this journey the client takes, he should receive the attention of both areas. This is why they should both work on a strategy and funnel in order to know when a MQL turns into a SQL.

To sum up, they should always work together.

sales and marketing funnel

Now, cleared up this issue first, we must go back to our main question:

Can a single person do all of it?

Yes and no. We are sorry we don't have a yes/no answer to this, but the thing is, it all depends on:

  1. The size of the company: The amount of responsibilities that this person would be in charge of, depends a lot on the company's size.
  2. The abilities of the person: We can't all multitask or have all the skills that are required in order to match both the sales and marketing needs. Now, you might be lucky enough to find someone who in fact has all the knowledge and the abilities to fully develop them all in both areas and, if that's the case well then, yes, that person can do both! (please send us this person's number by the way...)
  3. The company's projection for the long term period: If you plan to grow, then you should work on the progressive growth of your teams as well, so all the tasks and responsibilities that need to be managed, receive proper attention. If on the contrary, you don't plan to grow and you just want to successfully stay the same size, then maybe having a single (yet very capable person) would be enough to handle both wings of you plane.

So, as you can see, many factors come into play before you decide if you should have a single person handling both areas.

What we recommend is that, as your company grows, you adapt your teams to this growth. Ideally, after a lot of work and a successful growth, you should be able to consolidate two teams: sales and marketing, and each team should have its own leader, since this would make communication between teams easier.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

It would also be very helpful, whether you decide to have a person or two or more, to have a software that helps you in the management of all this strategy that Inbound Marketing involves, such as a CRM.

A CRM helps you provide a better customer service to each of your clients and automate processes so that your teams (or your person) are more free of mechanical tasks and devote themselves to more creative or complex issues, such as designing strategies, evaluating campaigns , visit clients, etc ...

If for now you will only have one person working on both areas (marketing and sales), a CRM would make his/her work much easier and allow this person to coordinate the efforts of both areas in a much more organized and simple way.

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