Let’s face it, sales and marketing departments are two sides of the same coin – they’re both put in place by businesses to essentially create more awareness, build relationships and boost revenues.

So what’s unquestionably puzzling in this current economic downturn is the question on every marketer’s lips – why aren’t these two teams talking to each other? What has led to this breakdown of communication and what can be done to solve it?

Well, let’s look at this logically and go back to basics. You wouldn’t expect a relay team to rely on one person to win a race, so why rely on a single area of your company to sell your product or service?

Of course, sales and marketing positions have independent roles – yet, they’re each striving towards the same goal. A sales department cannot afford to spend their time getting to know their customers inside out, just as marketers shy away from one-on-one meetings.

Indeed, the problem is not the two departments individual operations, yet the fact that they’re not melding their skills into a double act that could potentially see their business grow with twice the power and dominance at a time of shaky financial stability.

The irony is that the technique businesses need to focus on during a recession is precisely the one that most sales and marketing departments are weakest at – lead generation. In order for this dark art to deliver results, both divisions must pull together seamlessly.

So how do you send this sinking ship back afloat? Well, primarily there needs to be little, or if possible, no slashes through marketing budgets – whatsoever – not even a nip.

Consistency must make up the base of this business model – continuing to push your product, service and brand boldly, whilst retaining the highest level of contact between sales and marketing departments.

Once the communication barrier has been battered and the team is functioning productively as a whole, you’ll start to review the results and realise that those non-existent networks of communication between the sales and marketing departments have actually been detrimental to company performance and crucially affected customer commitment and loyalty.

Yet it’ll all be a learning curve to look back on, since your sales and marketing team is now a united force – with more insight, focus and passion than ever, and equally more capable of delivering effective lead generation campaigns in today’s wavering economic climate.

Yesterday saw the very successful press launch of re-plenish, the food bank charity set up in Oxford. I was proud to be part of it and witness the brand and website, created by MTD, unveiled. Last night and today we have already seen extensive TV and press coverage.

The re-plenish charity is operating an Oxford food bank, which takes unsold food from local supermarkets and suppliers and redistributes it to existing community food projects. Following a pilot phase the project is now up and running in and around Oxford taking surplus and ‘at sell by date’ food from local Sainsbury’s and Co-Operative supermarkets. This simple system provides healthy, wholesome food to people who need it and reduces the amount of unsold food that ends up in landfill. Currently approximately 20 million tonnes of food waste goes into landfill every year!

MTD got involved with this project about 18 months ago when we met Steve Moralee, the Chair of Trustees. We shared his belief, vision and infectious passion for this cause and quickly realised that our marketing expertise could help. You can read more about it in our latest news.

We have been overwhelmed by the dedication and effort that those involved have shown to get to this point, all volunteers, often holding down full time jobs. They are all to be congratulated for making this real and I hope that everyone that can, finds a way to get involved. After all, it affects every one of us.

One of the writers that we work with has some great regular tips at The Oxford Word Barber. His observations are sublime, his content is funny as well as educational and he makes complete sense… sometimes!

Whilst sitting at the traffic lights on the busy Talgarth Road junction near Earls Court, my attention was drawn to a For Sale sign on one of the very attractive buildings fronting the carriageway. It reads ‘RememberTheWindow.com‘. 48 hours later I was sat at my desk and guess what popped into my head for no conscious reason?

Through a stroke of pure memorable relevance and then personal intrigue, I was drawn in to the Blog site of Christian Braun and his family who, having had no success through Estate Agents, are trying to sell their home privately online.

I’m not in the market to part with £1.395M for a slice of England’s not so green and pleasant juxtaposed A4 despite the buildings beauty, but you have to applaud this chaps strategy and passion for promoting this house. It’s certainly drawing a crowd. Good luck Christian.

Check out RememberTheWindow.com and also see the coverage he got in The Sunday Times.

Things work best for me when they are simplified. Marketing and media in today’s world are a complex but essential component of any business and agencies have a duty to distill and simplify things for the client. When like minded professionals on both the client and agency side collaborate successfully the results can be very powerful and effective but things feel easy. However, a large percentage of SMEs, with limited resources and often limited expertise and knowledge, often struggle to understand and implement marketing strategies to lead their sales and business growth.

Thanks to the launch of a new Go To Market packaged marketing service, SMEs now have access to tried and tested, affordable marketing. Ideal for single or multiple campaigns, it could even act as an annual marketing strategy. It eliminates the need for the some of the traditional marketing campaign planning that determines the marketing strategy and deliverables, saving SME’s time and money.

If you were running a seasonal marketing campaign in summer for example, the package can be easily re-skinned for an autumn winter and spring offer to give you one campaign per quarter, all for

Similarly, it is ideal for event driven marketing campaigns such as promotional periods (Christmas, New year, Easter, Mothers Day etc.) or product promotions.

For more details, packages and prices go to www.go-to-market.uk.com.