If sales and marketing were husband and wife the divorce rate would be much higher than that of the 50% for traditional marriages. 

Deborah Penta, my guest on this week's episode of Meet the Sales Experts, shed some light on how the relationship between sales and marketing should work.  One of the things she said that I really liked was that executives "have an obligation" to market their companies and generate quality leads for their salespeople.  An obligation!  It doesn't get any better than that.

She also talked about the advantages of targeted, email marketing campaigns, including the ability to tweak them as you go along at very little additional cost compared with traditional direct mail.

Deborah talked about incorporating a sales and marketing philosphy into the company's sales culture - a comment similar to one made by  Jim Stephens back on July 22.

She had some very sound ideas for how marketing and sales should work together for trade shows and she talked about how sales and marketing should communicate in general.

In an interesting series of comments, Deborah had some very strong opinions about the place for social networking in business.  She believes that SOME of the social networking mediums are appropriate and even important for - pay attention - SOME businesses but not all. Her big point on this was that some companies throw pages up on Facebook and similar sites but fail to integrate those pages with the other parts of the overall marketing plan.  The result is that the company doesn't use it the right way, the page is not consistent with the company's other messages, and it has the potential to become an expensive branding mistake rather than an inexpensive marketing tactic.

Click here to listen to the entire episode.  Contact Deborah here.