Strategy
One team or several suppliers? How to decide
A typical sales and marketing set-up draws on several specialisms at once: the CRM, marketing automation, the website, paid search and analytics. Many businesses buy each from a different supplier. Others look for one team to do the lot. Neither is right by default. The useful question is where the joins between those pieces sit, and who is responsible for them.
Where separate suppliers struggle
Each specialist can do excellent work while the whole still fails. The problems tend to appear at the joins:
- the website form collects data the CRM can’t store
- marketing automation scores leads the sales team never sees
- paid search reports conversions that can’t be traced to revenue
- a change in one system breaks another, and each supplier points at the other
None of these sits clearly inside one supplier’s scope, so nobody owns them. Your own team ends up managing the joins, often without the technical knowledge to do it.
When one team makes sense
A single team is worth considering when:
- the work crosses systems, for example a new website that needs to feed Salesforce and Account Engagement
- you don’t have an in-house team to coordinate several suppliers
- your reporting has to follow a customer from first visit to closed deal
- you expect the platform to keep developing after launch, not just go live once
When it doesn’t
If you already have strong in-house skills in one area, you may only need help with the gaps, and a good partner should say so. ResponseTap is a useful example. It has its own Salesforce admins, and brought us in to help develop and roll out its own AppExchange product. In Stephen Whitehead’s words:
“We have an in-house team of Salesforce Admins, but we will be using Seamless Ideas for anything that falls outside of our skillsets.”
Stephen Whitehead, ResponseTap
That is a sensible arrangement. Full service should mean one team can cover everything, not that you have to buy everything.
The risk with one team, and how to manage it
Putting everything with one team carries its own risk: you come to depend on them. Manage it the way you would with several suppliers. Ask for documented requirements and a detailed technical handover for each piece of work, so that your own staff, or another partner, could pick up any part of it. A team that is confident in its work should be comfortable making itself replaceable.
Questions to ask, whoever you choose
| Ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Who documents and agrees the requirements? | Without written requirements, each supplier builds to its own assumptions |
| How is the work tested before launch? | Internal testing and user acceptance testing catch the problems at the joins |
| What will the technical handover include? | Your team, or the next supplier, needs to know how it was built |
| Who do we call when two systems disagree? | If the answer is “it depends”, nobody owns the join |
| Will you explain it without jargon? | Good decisions are made by people who understand them |
Our standard, whichever services you use: requirements documented and agreed with your stakeholders, thorough internal testing and user acceptance testing, a detailed technical handover, plain English rather than jargon, and consultants who stay in touch throughout.
What one team looked like for Air2O
Air2O makes next-generation hybrid air conditioning and has delivered cooling projects across Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. Its legacy CRM was outdated, and scaling it would have been expensive. We implemented Salesforce for the sales team and joined it to marketing, so both teams work from the same data, with role-based security, workflow automation, and reports for day-to-day and strategic decisions.
Alongside the CRM work, our design team produced Air2O’s website, a data centre website and a series of product and company brochures. One team covered the CRM, the link to marketing and the design work, so there were fewer joins for Air2O to manage itself.
Read the Air2O case study.
Deciding
List the systems your sales and marketing depend on, and mark every join where data or responsibility passes from one to another. If most of your problems sit at those joins, one team is likely to help. If they sit inside a single system, a specialist in that system may be all you need.
Find out more about our full-service Salesforce and marketing offer.
Next step
If you are weighing up one team against several suppliers, talk it through with us. We will help you work out which parts you need help with, and which you don’t.
