My friend, Dan McDade, President ofPointClear, has been leading an interesting discussion at Focus. He asked me the question, “would sales people be willing to share commissions with marketing if marketing was perceived to have done a better job for sales?” (it’s a good discussion, I recommend reading it.)

My immediate reaction was, “Isn’t marketing’s job to be supporting sales? Why do we need to pay them some of sales’ commissions if they do their job well?” I still maintain that position, but Dan’s question started me thinking. What would happen if we put marketing on a commission plan, what if we made them more accountable for the results they produced?

What if we came up with metrics that were closely aligned with sales-perhaps shared with sales and put every marketing person on commission? Would that drive greater cooperation? Would it eliminate the silo’s? Market and sales are both accountable for generating revenue and growing the company. Aligning everyone in marketing and sales around similar goals and objectives could only be good.

What metrics would we put in place? Clearly some level of revenue metric. Probably we’d look at some sort of lead quality metric. What about the nurturing programs that marketing conducts? How would we measure those? What about the other marketing deliverables used to support sales-clearly we don’t want to incent people on quantity, but we do want to look at some sort of metric around good quality collateral that really helps sales and is meaningful to customers.

Another thing we might do is align marketing and sales teams together-for example the marketing people supporting the financial sectors, with the sales people selling in those sectors. Likewise in manufacturing, health and so forth. Perhaps we can put these team on some sort of shared goals. Many sales people have shared goals with other sales people, so we can design a system that would bring marketing into the team. It might be very powerful.

I’m certain that we can design some metrics-some individual, some team oriented that can get sales people and marketing people to work more collaboratively. I think this should be done.

Now what about commission? I’m all for paying marketing people commission. Frankly, I would put everyone in an organization around some sort of “commission” or incentive program. But, there’s no reason to take that commission away from sales people. It’s easy to design a commission program for marketing. We use the same principles we do for sales people.