By: Maria Williams
Sales and marketing are two teams that directly drive a business’ revenue and growth. They are crucial to the success of any establishment. With no marketing team, no one would know a business existed. And without a sales team, none of that awareness would come to fruition in the form of an actual customer base. Yet, these two departments are widely known sources of contention within any industry. Justin Geib, Vice President of Sales at Dell Technologies, shares his insights on the role of AI in bridging that divide.
When sales and marketing departments work in tandem, that’s where the magic happens. There’s a delicate balance of trust that forms the foundation of their roles as revenue drivers. Sales teams have to trust their marketing peers to point in the right direction on which leads they should spend their time. Similarly, marketing teams have to trust that their sales peers will successfully execute their hard work. But that trust is often absent, leading to silos between departments that can be detrimental to businesses.
This divide is precisely because of the complementary nature of their company roles. By design, marketing teams are more focused on holistic, data-driven methods to generate leads and position businesses as a unique standout in the wider landscape. On the other hand, sales teams work on more immediate timescales and on a more individual, face-to-face basis. Their job is to successfully convert a marketing team’s qualified leads into customers and generate revenue. Instead of long-term brand awareness, sales teams are more concerned with meeting revenue quotas, closing deals, and building client relationships.
While the intention of that organizational structure is for the two departments to fit like puzzle pieces and drive forward the growth of their business, the common complaint at water coolers is a fundamental disconnect in their strategies and alignment. As VP of Sales Justin Geib posits, “Although it’s impossible to generalize, at worst, I see a power dynamic where sales teams believe that marketing is out of touch with their consumer base and gathers poor quality leads. In response, marketing teams view sales as lazy, inefficient, and unable to effectively convert leads.”
As artificial intelligence (AI) platforms increasingly find their way into business structures, integrated into the most minute operations, it’s no surprise that they’ve also supplemented marketing and sales departments. As companies look for new growth strategies in this landscape, they are increasingly using AI tools to grow their sales forces. There are now platforms marketing teams can use to gather leads from various sources and marry them with sales forecasts through ‘hit lists’ – what Geib calls a list of qualified leads. Such platforms grow connections between sales and marketing teams. “AI platforms can breed new levels of trust between teams because of their ability to correlate data,” he explains.
Whereas previously, marketing provided hit lists to sales with no additional data or context, leading to a gap in knowledge between why leads may fail to be converted, AI platforms show exactly how leads are gathered. Whether from conferences or updated website activity, marketing teams can demonstrate why they are compelling salespeople to contact them.
His over 15 years of experience in leading cross-functional sales teams makes Justin Geib a particularly strong voice in filling the silos between sales and its partner, marketing. An expert in multi-cloud infrastructure, AI, machine learning, and cybersecurity, he has also witnessed AI’s transformation in flattening organizations across companies and tightly tying departments together. “AI is playing a bigger and bigger part in the IT industry: in product and software development, its influence on supply chain models, customer support, and more. There are a lot of spaces that it’s filtering through, and it’s just getting started.”
Implementing AI tools can help sales teams gather data, make decisions, train teams, and identify gaps faster. Most importantly, it upgrades their forecasting abilities. Instead of interrupting a salesperson’s flow with endless meetings to check up on deals, updates, and next steps, AI tools can collate a team’s shared knowledge and organize it almost instantly. By nature, they are constantly getting better at it.
However, while AI continues to embed itself within operations, that doesn’t necessarily equate to its total adoption. “It’s just the human condition, we don’t like change that much,” notes Geib. Individual team members may resist the full potential that AI platforms have to offer. In response, it’s up to team leaders to digest the full capabilities of integrated tech and model their adoption so that teams can follow suit. “If leaders themselves aren’t fully aware of how to use AI tools, then they can’t expect their teams to embrace them. Once that knowledge is there, leaders can develop their teams as needed to accelerate its adoption.”
The spread of AI across the industry is rapid. It shows no sign of slowing down, as key components of Geib’s ethos of leadership, support, and communication appear to be just as crucial to productive collaboration between departments as they are to the teams themselves. He concludes, “The right teams support each other while remaining internally competitive. The right team leader continues the practice of positive reinforcement even in high-pressure environments. While AI now accompanies that relationship, silos are only filled when we become part of its feedback loops.”
Published by: Martin De Juan
