It has been an old age battle, a battle that either both suffer or both end up as a winner. It’s like a Celtics-Lakers rivalry that goes through the ages but both share the same success. A never ending confict that both parties would depict. Contradicting parties having diferrent views but had the common goal, but different objectives known to many as Marketing and Finance.
Being in a small enterprise or a multi-national corporation, these two departments would always have an argument. The Marketing would always want to sell as more as possible whereas the Finance people are looking on to save as much as possible. Being in the corporate world for almost half a decade, and being on the Finance side, I do always observe the cold shoulders between these two departments.
Being a Finance person, our concerns would always be on “how we can minimize a specific cost”, “is it better to hold or sell a particular property”, “are we going to earn on the proposal at hand” and among others. This has been a norm, the concern of Finance people is the net income or net profit.
The sales person on the other hand would always tell you that “we can generate this amount of sales increase because of this project”, “we would be serving more clients if this deal would push through” and among others. Their concern is their ability to sell. As long as they are getting clients to transact business, they are doing great.
The two departments usually collide because the Finance people would look on the bottom line. Whereas the Sales people would look on the top line which is the Sales. Both have their own objectives, the Finance people would look on to the effect on the bottom line while the Sales people would look on the top line. Their concerns usually collide because there will be proposals that are costly to make and would only result to little earnings over the project cost.
Sales people usually are optimistic type of people who are always looking forward that great things are going to happen and their projections would come to results. They would dare to enter risky decisions to attain their objective of providing more sales to the organization. Managers who have come up with a new idea of engaging into a new venture would want to talk to sales people because they would feel that there are opportunities for the venture and would not want those opportunities to be wasted.
Finance people on the other hand are pessimistics, they might seem to appreciate an idea but are keen on giving an opinion because they are thinking of the risks that have to be overcome. They would always question an opportunity’s ability to generate results. Managers would also want to talk to them upon coming up with a new business idea because of the things that was not considered before making up the idea or the company’s resources are insufficient to pursue the idea.
Decisions have to be made in business and the concern of both parties are both considered. It is up to the CEO or the Management to choose to decide as to what actions are to be taken care of. Managers usually weigh the concerns of the two divisions because if they would keep on listening to the Sales team, they might engage into projects or ventures that would not result to profits. On the other hand, if they would keep to listen on the views of the Finance people, they might have let opportunities to earn slip through their hands.
Usually, what good managers do is that they weigh the concern of both parties and come up with solutions that would result to more sales and eventually more profits to the organization. Listening to only a few persons with the same objective would give you one result whereas listening to persons with diferrent objectives can open up the possibility of earning more and minimizing the risks that have to be gone through by way of technically studying the decision to be cared of.
Business and Beyond 