The sales team laments how harshly they feel judged by the VP. This morning’s meeting wasn’t exactly joyful. The team has four days left in the month, but more importantly, they’re a few hundred thousand dollars away from hitting their number. Laurie, the VP, challenged them to hit it hard, reinforcing the importance of achieving the monthly sales goal. 
“We relaxed after getting off to a great start,” she told the group. It was true. The great start. The team had a pretty good book of business going into the month, fueled largely by a few deals that were landed the prior month, but didn’t hit the books until this current month. Even they admit they had likely not hustled like they could have in week 2. But since then they’ve worked really hard. One week. But as everybody in sales knows, one off week can wreck a month. 
Laurie informs the group of a new marketing effort due to launch in Q3. That’s 4 months away, but okay thinks the sales team. She shows them a short slide deck outlining the initiatives. She wants them to hear of the coming launch directly from her, and not through the grapevine. But she’s insistent that they not become distracted by it. She doesn’t want to spend much time on it today. Too late. She’s inadvertently opened a box of snakes. 
Robert, one of the senior (and most productive) sales guys pipes up at one slide that is problematic based on his experience with customers. And so begins a conversation about how the marketing department never speaks to the sales team. “I don’t think they’ve got a clue what really happens out on the street,” he says. “They don’t know what we do. And they sure don’t seem to be interested enough to understand.” 
Laurie bristles. You can tell she feels it’s sort of a slam on her. After all, she’s the VP of Sales. After a few more brief minutes of banter, she tries to refocus the group on the task at hand. Make the month. She tables the conversation for another day and assures the group that they’ll finish this discussion, but later. For now, the group has to maintain solid attention on bringing in just under $400,000 over the next 4 days. Meeting dismissed!
This scenario happens too frequently. And I’m not talking about a sales team that is coming up short with not many days left — that’s certainly commonplace. I’m talking about one department feeling like another department is clueless about their work. I’m talking about people inside an organization who feel siloed from others. People who feel underappreciated and misunderstood. Sales and marketing departments operate under different metrics and dashboards. So their love/hate relationship is more common than it should be. 
Rather than assign blame, let’s think about what’s going on, and what we can do to find a remedy. 
Sales is a today activity. Nobody cares what you did yesterday. And tomorrow isn’t even here yet. 
Marketing isn’t nearly as measurable. The performance parameters look and feel much different. 
But the problem, and the solution is much more basic. It’s connection and collaboration. It doesn’t have to be sales and marketing. It can be any group inside an organization or company that impacts another group. Or it could be individual people. It’s the classic right hand and left hand relationship. Too many of us are in organizations where we can readily admit, “The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.” 
We could think about power struggles, bases of authority and ego — all valid things that contribute to the disruption of connection and collaboration. But those can much less practical issues to handles. I’m a practical guy.