Written by Jon Miller, author of the Modern B2B Marketing blog and VP of Marketing for lead management software company, Marketo

The gap between marketing and sales teams has been around since the two functions were created and is usually just accepted as an irreparable inconvenience in many businesses. Sales thinks only they are worried about the quarter; Marketing thinks they are the only ones who think strategically. Sales wonder why they have to generate all their own leads; Marketing complains that sales ignores or criticizes everything they generate. Sales thinks marketing is lightweight and easy; Marketing thinks salespeople will say anything to get a deal.

It is time for this fighting to stop. As the spread of the internet and social media transform the B2B buying process, aligning the warring departments has never been more critical to driving revenue and growth. And stopping the fighting begins by understanding the real and significant differences between the two functions.

There are a number of factors on which marketing and sales differ, including timeframes, goals, and ways of showing value. While marketers look months and even years down the road as they seek to develop a brand and grow broad interest in their company, sales is laser-focused on hitting their numbers for the here and now. Each viewpoint meets a distinct and valid business need, but these contrasting views lead to conflicting perceptions of what contributes to the overall success of the business. It also means that marketing and sales tend to attract different skill sets and risk profiles, which exacerbates the “us versus them” mentality and makes it harder to appreciate the other’s disciplines.

The dissonance is further intensified by the feeling among marketers that they are treated as second-class citizens while sales gets the glory (and the incentive-based compensation). The value of a new sales win is immediately quantifiable as new revenue, but marketing is often seen as a cost center because its impact on revenue isn’t made explicit. (Marketers often exacerbate this by focusing too much on measuring activity instead of outcomes; while it’s easy to measure sales outcomes but hard to measure sales activity, the opposite is true in marketing.)

What to do about it?

Put simply, these difference means that Sales is from Mars, and Marketing is from Venus. Therefore, they key to closing the gap between marketing and sales is not to slam the two groups into one function under one leader, as some pundits advise. And it’s not to force marketers to behave more like salespeople, with aggressive quotas and huge variable compensation. Instead, the answer is to recognize that marketing and sales bring different strengths to the revenue process, and to find ways to get the best out of each function in a coordinated, efficient process.

In my next guest post, I’ll share my six keys to building a happy marriage between sales and marketing, so stay tuned!