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Number
67: September 1, 2004
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This week in Katydid:
The
Department of Intelligence
In many organizations, Sales & Marketing feels more like Sales v.
Marketing. This has less to do with the competitiveness or competence of
either group, and more to do with incentives and influence over the
process.
For example, recently I had lunch with a marketing colleague who had
left her promising corporate career for a more promising (and
fulfilling) career as an independent. Like many of us, she was not
running away from a bad scene, she was leaving to make better use of her
skills.
Of course, there were politics and infighting as you have with any
organization. However, she had endured worse environments. It wasn't
money or stability, because those are hardly guaranteed in freelance
consulting. She had a complex mix of reasons, but one factor was that
she wasn't getting to do marketing at all.
The definition
of marketing according to the American Heritage Dictionary
is,
1. The act or process of buying and selling in a market. 2. The
commercial functions involved in transferring goods from producer to
consumer.
That definition makes clear that marketers can't divorce themselves
from sales. You can find evidence of the tight connection in your own
job titles, many of which are V.P. or Director of Sales & Marketing.
These organizations measure marketing's success by lead generation and
may even tie bonuses to the conversion of leads.
According the American Marketing Association,
"Marketing
is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing,
promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create
exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives."
This suggests a strategic
role for the marketer, but you have to consider that marketers wrote
this definition. You won't find the word 'sales' in there at all. You
can label this distancing from sales as many things – arrogance, envy,
frustration – but blaming others is just a way to distance oneself from
the more proximate cause: the inability to do one's own job well.
I'm going to emphasize that I used the word 'inability' rather than
'incapacity.' The ability to market well depends on how the organization
supports and incents marketing. Sales are a perfectly acceptable measure
of marketing's success, if marketing has influence in the development of
the market.
As a marketer, you can't be successful if you're handed a product and
told to provide a list of warm leads to sales. In that position, all a
marketer can do is find the low-hanging fruit – the easy pickings.
That's something a good sales team could do, if they weren't so busy
already. In this role, marketing becomes the SLQ team for sales. At some
point, however, those low branches are stripped bare.
In this circumstance, you can see why marketing would not want their
performance tracked to sales. They know they can't be successful in the
long term, because they have no more influence over the process than
sales does. In fact, they have less because they can't control the
quality of the sales staff. This is what I mean by the inability to do
one's job well.
Put into another context, marketing is about intelligence. Marketers
gather and analyze data about your market. This information is valuable
not just to sales, but also to product development, finance, customer
service, and every other department in your organization. Marketers are
number crunchers as well as field operatives.
Developing intelligence is an iterative process. Everything you learn
is fed back into the system in order for you to learn more. This
feedback loop means the system already is tuned to change. You will
discover trends and be able to respond to them. If one pipeline goes
dry, you have the ability to find the next one.
While gathering, testing, and analyzing all seem like passive roles
as our culture defines them, they provide information that organizations
can act on. Since strategy is a plan for choices, you can execute
strategy only if you know what choices you have. Marketing tells you
what your options are.
Some organizations feel that they already know about their markets.
The C-level team came up through the ranks of their market and they are
familiar with those pains. I call this 'Intuition Marketing,' but it's
about going into battle with old intelligence. It's like saying,
"The enemy stronghold is on that hill, it's always been on that
hill. Let's attack that hill," when the enemy has already moved
behind you.
If you want to know if you're acting on strong intelligence, you need
look no further than your own messaging. If your copy is vague and
conditional, then you have faulty intelligence. If you see a lot of
cliché's and generalizations, your strategy is not based on real
information. If your content looks and sounds exactly like your
competitors' content, you're using the same intelligence.
Give marketers the role of intelligence officers within your
organization, and you will make every department run more efficiently
because they will have stronger strategy. Product knows whom they are
building for and what they will buy. Finance knows what price the market
will support and where there is room for profit. Sales knows that the
product and the customer make a perfect match, and they know what that
is worth to the customer. And Marketing has no concerns about providing
leads because they know there's more where those came from.
Marketing makes clear how every department contributes to sales. With
that information, nobody minds taking credit (or earning bonuses) based
on sales or revenue. Just don't tell sales; it boosts their confidence
to think they're doing it on their own.
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Kevin Troy Darling
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