Sales and marketing have many reasons why they might not work together well, but one is that they start with a fundamentally different view of the business universe.

Sales people sell to individuals and small buying teams. They are always trying to understand their customer, their particular needs, and how that person can be motivated to buy from them.

Marketers, on the other hand, typically start with personas: a fictional composite of the customer based on research. Sometimes these have names like Marketing Mary and Finance Frank. These personas and market segments drive marketing messaging and targeting.

As more sophisticated companies add more and more data to their customer records, they will create deeper profiles of individual customers. Like the recommendations on Amazon, they will become increasingly personalized. But no matter how much data they use, the customer record will never have the nuanced personal knowledge that a salesperson can.

On the other hand the salesperson will never the breadth of knowledge that is in the customer record. They certainly won’t remember every piece of content that the customer looked at, and every interaction that they’ve had with the company.

Both sales and marketing have great, but incomplete knowledge. The magic happens when they respect one another and begin true collaboration.

Usually the support of an influencer helps the marketing and sales of a company.

In the gun industry it seems to be the exact opposite.

Remington has announced that it intends to declare bankruptcy. The problem is that the president is too friendly to the gun industry.

When Obama was president even the slightest hint of a new gun regulation triggered massive sales of guns and every related item. The best way to sell more assault rifles is to suggest reinstating the assault rifle ban that expired in 2004.

But now with Trump and a gun-friendly Congress in office, gun sales have slumped and 202-year-old Remington is having trouble paying the $1B in private equity debt it took on in 2007.

Be careful what you ask for.

Valentine’s Day rituals have evolved over centuries but a major commercial disruption happened in 1849 in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Expensive, hand-made Valentine’s Day cards had been around for decades, but Esther Howland wondered if they couldn’t be mass produced and sold for less. In 1849 she produced a dozen samples and asked her brother, who was handling sales for her father’s stationary company, to see if there was any interest in them. She hoped to get $200 in orders but he came back from a sales trip with $5,000 in orders!

Her cards were hand-made but she did it at scale and could sell them for far less than other companies. She used high quality paper and introduced many new designs. Eventually she targeted every part of the market with cards selling for 5 cents to $50. Within a few years her business was selling over $100,000 in cards a year – the equivalent of a several million dollar business today.

She sold her company 30 years later and Worcester remained the “Valentine Capital of America” for several more decades.

A year ago the head of brand for P&G, the largest advertiser in the world, told the digital advertising platforms that they had until the end of 2017 to clean up their act. He wanted much better accountability and transparency about their ad spend – a better system for knowing that the ads they were paying for were actually running, and were fully visible to people for a set amount of time.

This week Marc Pritchard gave the industry a passing grade. While not all issues have been resolved, he said that so much progress had been made by the major players (Facebook and Google), and they were demonstrating so much effort, that he was satisfied (with more work to be done). He did say, though, that some smaller ad platforms had not shown as good a results and P&G had cut their advertising from them.

P&G is still off of YouTube because of brand safety issues: they aren’t assured that the videos that their ads are showing on are on brand.

That was a big sigh of relief from the ad industry that you heard.

But then Monday the CMO of Unilever, the fourth largest largest advertiser in the world, said that they would pull their advertising from digital platforms that “breed division in society or fail to protect children.”

“As a brand-led business, Unilever needs its consumers to have trust in our brands. We can’t do anything to damage that trust—including the choice of channels and platforms we use. So, 2018 is the year when social media must win that trust back,” said CMO Keith Weed.

He didn’t name names but the assumption is that he is especially talking about Facebook, Twitter and Google.

This is a little curious to me. I know that there are issues with fake news and bots, but the vast majority of content on Facebook is posts from friends and family. A few weeks ago Facebook said they would reduce content from brands and publishers even further — even if that meant a cut in usage time by people.

Ads on the Google Display Network appear primarily on third-party sites. They claim they can reach 90% of Internet users worldwide on over two million sites. On the AdWords Display Network Placements tab you can see exactly where your ads are running – and you can blacklist sites. Surely an advertiser the size of Unilever can automate the monitoring of those sites.

Twitter, on the other hand, is still the wild west.

A recent study found that the customer acquisition cost (CAC) for B2B and B2C subscription companies has risen almost 50% over the past five years.  This isn’t entirely surprising to me since I wrote in September that the CAC for HubSpot has risen over 100% in that period. (Remember: CAC is the average cost to acquire a new customer: all sales and marketing expenses divided by the number of new customers.)

Subscription companies differ from those with traditional pay-per-product business models. They are typically cloud services and include Carbonite backups, security software, and thousands of sales and marketing software companies.

CAC can vary by channel. For years proponents of content and inbound marketing have said that it was more cost-effective than other channels like search and display ads. What the study also found, though, was that the CAC of content marketing is rising even faster and is now approaching that of other channels.

The authors of the study only looked at one industry or business mode: the subscription economy. This reinforces my idea that marketing channels can become saturated and, eventually, inefficient. Subscription companies are especially adept at digital marketing so this is a particularly acute problem for them. In other industries, though, where many companies under-invest in marketing the opportunities are still especially great for the ones that do.

And even if the CAC is rising, companies can continue to use these channels so long as they provide a positive ROI. For now, they do.

Marketing Tips reader Ian Gilbert recently sent me this article about Doritos creating a “lady-friendly” chip. CEO Indra Nooyi, a woman herself, describes how many men lick their fingers after eating the chips, and pour the final crumbs into their mouths, but women would never dream of doing that. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public, etc. (Clearly we run in different circles…)

So they haven’t released a product yet but Nooyi said, “It’s not a male and female as much as, ‘Are there snacks for women that can be designed and packaged differently?’ And yes, we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon. For women, low-crunch, the full taste profile, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers, and how can you put it in a purse? Because women love to carry a snack in their purse.”

The Internet was not kind. And within a few days PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, said that they would not be releasing a Doritos for Ladies.

This reminds me of the BIC Cristal for Her pen which has received thousands of mostly-humorous mock reviews on Amazon, like “Someone has answered my gentle prayers and FINALLY designed a pen that I can use all month long! I use it when I’m swimming, riding a horse, walking on the beach and doing yoga. It’s comfortable, leak-proof, non-slip and it makes me feel so feminine and pretty! Since I’ve begun using these pens, men have found me more attractive and approchable. It has given me soft skin and manageable hair and it has really given me the self-esteem I needed to start a book club and flirt with the bag-boy at my local market. “

Brands need to be extra-careful when getting anywhere near issues related to gender, race, sexual identity, and so on. I know a woman who worked on the development of the Venus razor for women at Gillette. Now that was a situation that required a special razor for women. Women who shave shave differently than men: men shave a small part of their face, women shave large parts of their bodies; men tend to shave at the sink, many women shave in the shower; the attitudes of men and women toward shaving are very different; etc. Having a razor that was tailored to those needs was a big success.

And it was nice of the Internet to save Doritos the bother of creating a new Doritos for Ladies.

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Traditionally marketing has been one-to-many with broadcast media such as TV, radio, billboards and print, and direct mail with minimal if any personalization.

And sales was one-to-one.

But increasingly marketing is personalized. Jeff Bezos said 20 years ago that Amazon should not have one home page, it should have millions – and it does: each tailored to best sell to that individual. B2B companies are significantly improving their websites, their most important marketing asset, by personalizing based the company of the person visiting, their previous website activity, their interactions with other content of the company (emails, social media posts, etc.) and third-party data. Improved capabilities to identify individuals will mean even greater personalization in emails, direct mail, even ads.

Sales, on the other hand, in many cases has changed to a one-to-many function requiring selling to a buying team of many people with potentially very different interests. Even selling to a family can involved a “buying team” of children of the elderly, or other groups.

This all puts new demands on both marketing and sales. Sales people need to understand a much broader set of buyers, and marketing needs to help them with customer insights and appropriate content.

I recently saw a quote from Jeff Bezos in which outlined a central part of his business strategy:

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

“In our retail business we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ [or] ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’ Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

Similarly, in the interview with Eileen Fisher for the (highly recommended) “How I Built This” podcast, she says that she was inspired to design much simpler clothes by the Japanese kimono – a design that had lasted centuries. Over and over when she was starting out people would say, “They’re nice, but they’re so… simple.” And she’d say, “Yes, that’s the idea.”

Sometimes you don’t need to chase after the latest and greatest, or try to anticipate the next trend. Sometimes you need to just understand, and deliver, what your customers will always want.

The #1 advertising event of the year has passed and we now can pick winners and losers.

An overnight Ad Age survey of several thousand advertising and marketing practitioners ranked the “Alexa Loses Her Voice” ad top, with Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad” in second. That seems reasonable to me. The Amazon Alexa ad was fun and memorable, not least of all because Jeff Bezos made a personal appearance in it.

I thought the Tide ad especially clever from a purely marketing (as opposed to entertainment) point of view: setting up viewers early on to notice the clean clothes in all ads and associate them with Tide. I felt bad for the creative team of Persil ProClean detergent (which I had never heard of, but Consumer Reports ranks it as the best detergent). Their ad was okay, and kind of clever, but I kept wondering if it was a parody that was going to flip into the real product. It was blown away by the Tide ad; the agency probably had an unpleasant morning call with their client.

The “Dirty Dancing” touchdown celebration spoof featuring Eli Manning and Odell Beckham, Jr. was certainly entertaining – and touchdown celebrations definitely need spoofing — but I don’t know how much it did for the brand.

On the other end of the stick, the RAM Trucks ad featuring the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a definite loser. I could not figure out what they were hoping to achieve with that – it had no credibility. You never believed for an instant that King would be promoting Ram Trucks, and then it came out shortly afterwards that in the same sermon King went on to condemn advertising in general, and car and Chrysler ads by name.

Gating content is when you require people to give you some identifying information (usually at least name and email address) to download or view a piece of your content. A constant debate among marketers is when, or even if, content should be gated.

Pro: You build up your database of contacts and can market to them.

Con: Fewer people will see your content, and the information they give you may not be accurate anyway (Bugs Bunny at loonytunes.com).

At last Tuesday night’s Sales & Marketing Innovators panel on demand generation, Evergage CMO Andy Zimmerman said that they have recently ungated almost all of their content – even something as valuable as a 180-page ebook on personalization. They feel that as a result they get far more downloads of their content, it gets distributed more, more people link to their site, and the people who do provide their contact information are legit and higher quality.

An interest in fewer, more highly qualified contacts and leads was mentioned by the other panelists, too.

It’s worth considering.