How Law & Order Can Help You Increase Sales

Odds are you’ve seen at least parts of an episode of the decades-long running Law & Order TV series. The opening narrator says in a distinctive, deep voice: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: The police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”

I take that opening and apply it to business:

In business, brands are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: Marketers who create and execute strategies to generate interest and awareness among potential customers, and sales, who turns that interest into revenue by closing deals with customers.

The problem is far too often these two groups don’t work together enough and actually don’t
understand their roles as clearly as they could.

I’ve been fortunate to have both areas under my responsibility many times and been able to
watch as they collaborated to grow companies from millions to billions of dollars in revenue.

Why does this only happen for a small percentage of companies?

Sometimes it’s because a small to midsize company grew through sales to a couple of large
clients and then realized they needed to market to achieve ongoing growth. They had a sales bias and thought that marketing was a subservient function that made things like websites and presentation decks look pretty.

In other instances, marketing teams were too concerned about creative and professional
marketing activities that they lost sight of what was needed to push a lead from prospect to customer.

The first step towards collaborative success with both marketing and also sales working together is to understand their different functions and how they are evaluated.

Sales is an efficiency function that can be monitored and assessed by anyone. What are our sales this year? How does that compare to our goal? How does it compare to last year? What are sales projected to be next month? Quarter? Year? Yes, I’ve simplified it for length and clarity’s sake. There are sophisticated metrics that go deeper. But we all can understand the general success or lack thereof with a sales team.

Marketing is an effectiveness function that doesn’t have quite the exactness when assessing it. It’s also much more of a long-term play than Sales. Building the brand, creating awareness, attributing where a lead or sale came from are all less clear than looking at a salesperson’s sales numbers.

The challenge is that most departments and functions within a business are efficiency functions and can be evaluated as such. This means that the CEO might’ve came up through one of the other major disciplines such as finance, operations or sales, and they are more comfortable evaluating efficiency functions. Plus, the other senior leaders are evaluating their areas which are also efficiency driven.

This goes on down through the ranks of the company, which leads to a misperception of
Marketing throughout many organizations.

Marketers aren’t blameless by any means. First, they need to be more efficient and communicate how efficient they are. Second, they need to tell their story internally and be clear on what their goals and objectives are and how they will bring an ROI to the company.

What’s your takeaway as a team member or leader at your company?

• Think differently about both Sales and also Marketing as functions within your
  organization.
• Understand how efficiency functions are different from effectiveness functions.
  If you’re in Sales, tell your story to Marketing when they aren’t meeting your needs while explaining the “why.” Just complaining that you aren’t hitting your goals because of
  Marketing missing something doesn’t solve any problem.
• If you’re in Marketing, you also have to tell your story better throughout the organization while making sure you are getting things done in a cost-effective manner.

When Marketing and Sales are working in tandem, your business will be poised for success.
Listen. You can almost hear the iconic sound of Law & Order’s “Dun-Dun” effect.

Author and marketing trailblazer Dave Mastovich has helped companies transform their
messaging and improve their Marketing ROI for decades. He’s founder and CEO of
MASSolutions, host of the No BS Marketing podcast and author of the book Get Where You Want
to Go Through Marketing, Selling and Story Telling. His blog, Light Reading, has been featured in over 50 media outlets with readership of more than 1 million.