The black hole that can exist between marketing and sales in software companies

This can be a huge topic, even books written about it and software companies started to provide related solutions - but here is what still surprises me today, after 30 years of selling in the software business.

I can not tell you how many sales reps I meet or work with today who lose site of the competition, they do not take them seriously with no effective plan to deal with them, especially in a proactive manner - helping the competitor to lose!

And these are senior reps, who have been trained on several methods, incl. Holden, such as solution selling, spin selling, strategic selling - the list goes on and on. Yet they fall off the wagon and revert to bad habits and selling behavior.

I'm just shocked when I simply ask reps in accts/oppty reviews - who is the competitor, what is his strategy and what is our counter strategy? The professional answers are few and far between.

But they can sure talk all day long about our solutions as aligned with customer buying behavior, etc.

Software companies, primarily driven by the marketing dept are so driven to focus on just the y axis of the Holden balanced selling model - it can influence sales behavior. All we hear, day in and day out, over and over is value value value and solutions solutions solutions.

(as a sidebar to this, how many sw companies preach value/soln selling but go to their public website to see a list of products - that is yet another blog)

And yes, we see some of the most sophisticated competitive intel departments gathering insightful data in real time. And yes, the reps go and look at it. Often however, the rep does not know what to do with the data.

Something is missing. There is this disconnect, that black hole (which has many attributes, this just being one of them). Where is competitive adeptness? Where is the focus on the x axis, the competitor(s) and then, the balance with the value and solutions based selling y axis?

Thank you Holden Int'l for making this clear and providing a world class model. I'd like to start this blog for selling foxes to share ideas and best practices on how to better reinforce the Holden model across an integrated enterprise, and begin with closing the gap between sales and marketing.

Do we move the competitive intel dept from marketing to the sales dept or sales ops?

Then later we can tackle the links (or lack thereof) between the sales dept and R&D, services, finance, hr, IT, etc. Whew!