What’s a VP/Director/Manager of Sales & Marketing?

I know what a VP/Director/Manager of Sales does, I know what a VP/Director/Manager of Marketing does, but I’ve always been somewhat perplexed about what a VP/Director/Manager of Sales & Marketing does. Over the years, whenever I meet someone with a ‘Sales & Marketing’ title I usually try to have some conversation about their job to find out more about their role. Without exception the person in that role is a salesperson with primary responsibility for sales. A quick review of current VP/Director/Manager of Sales & Marketing job postings confirms that the requirements for these positions are primarily sales related.

Based on my anecdotal research, the Sales & Marketing organization is really a sales organization with a small marketing functional area in a secondary, supportive role usually responsible for primarily two types of deliverables:

  1. Lead generation – generally a more tactical function than you would find in a full-fledged marketing organization. Focus and performance measurement is on driving the volume of leads into the top of the sales funnel needed to eventually and hopefully produce the required volume of sales from the bottom of the funnel.
  2. Sales collateral – production of tactical collateral such as brochures, datasheets, product overviews, case studies, etc. used during the sales process.

"The Sales/Marketing Manager is like an amphicar (amphibious car). Great idea, but what you really get is a highly ineffective car and a highly ineffective boat." – Mark Goff

The marketing functional area in this type of organization generally doesn’t have the bandwidth, budget or management support for a market-driven approach or a more strategic marketing role. However, the marketing functional area in these organizations can add more value and some strategic direction to help sales be more effective and productive:
  • While the performance measure for lead generation is on volume into the sales funnel, marketing should add research, analysis and segmentation to drive more targeted and relevant leads. Sales will appreciate not wasting time and effort chasing 100 leads with a 2% probability of closing versus focusing on 30 more targeted leads with a 10% probability of closing.
  • For the collateral, marketing should add value to make the materials more appropriate for the intended audience and provide guidance to sales for using the materials more effectively:
    • Strategic messaging aligned with the value your stuff creates for customers should be used consistently in the materials.
    • Develop the materials to align for use at the various stages of the sales cycle. It’s not ‘show up and throw up’ as many salespeople are inclined – guide salespeople on which materials to use at each stage of the sales cycle to help move the buyer to the next stage.
  • Company website – if you haven’t already, take control of the company website and make it a marketing vehicle that all business websites should be.
In spite of marketing usually being in a tactical, supportive role reporting to a VP/Director/Manager of Sales & Marketing, there are several ways for marketing to add more value, help sales be more effective, improve results and ultimately raise the stature of marketing in these organizations.

Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Are you Inside-out or Outside-In?

Anyone who has worked with me has probably heard me refer to ‘outside-in’ versus ‘inside-out’ more times than they care to remember. While these are familiar terms and concepts to marketers, seems that many of us are easily captivated by all the wonderful new things our companies are doing with products, services and technology, causing our messaging to be inside-out. This appears to be more prevalent in B2B and particularly Information Technology companies.

Take an example of a Distribution Company that needs an operational system to expand their business for new opportunities in after-sales services. They make some inquiries, visit websites, receive emails, white papers, etc., but most of the information is about “platforms”, “services oriented architecture”, “next generation technology”, “software as a service”, product feature/functions, product brand names and other inside-out jargon, all of which are meaningless to them. The prospective buyer begins to question whether anyone actually has a solution to meet their business needs.

“Nobody cares about your products and services (except you)” – Pragmatic Marketing

Outside-in begins with customer value. The ‘customer’ is not just research, demographics and statistics about some market segment. It’s about the current problems, challenges and opportunities that real companies and people face in markets you plan to serve. What roles these people have in companies, what they worry about, what solutions they really need, how these businesses operate and many other factors.

Value is defined by the customer or prospective buyer – it’s not your list of perceived benefits, ROI and other claims. The value is expressed in terms of how your solution creates value for customers by meeting their real needs within their context.

With this deeper understanding of what, where, who and how to provide customer value, you’ll be ready to formulate an outside-in marketing strategy with value propositions that connect with the real needs of these customers. To make the outside-in value connection, messaging should start with value in customer terminology and context, along with specific messaging for the roles of key influencers and decision-makers.

A good consequence of the outside-in approach is that you will have more definitive market segments comprised of sets of companies based on their specific needs and the value you provide. Expanding on the Distribution Company example – you may find a common trend that industrial distributors are facing a slowdown in their traditional business, but some are seeing more demand for installation and maintenance services. If you can create value by providing a solution for them to quickly establish the necessary capabilities for a services business extension, then that would define a very specific target market segment.

Businesses are always looking for growth opportunities. Being market-driven and following an outside-in marketing approach are excellent strategies for driving growth.

There’s a lot more to the outside-in / inside-out discussion I’ll revisit in future blog posts. Your comments are always welcome.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Marketing in a ‘Market-driven’ company

This is the fifth post in the series about marketing considerations relative to company culture drivers. Being market-driven means that everything done by everyone in the company is driven by the needs of the target market(s) you serve. Easy to say, makes sense to most people, many agree with the proposition, but truly market-driven companies are in the minority, particularly in B2B.

The following are key characteristics of market-driven companies (in no particular order):

  1. Strategically selecting the market(s) and segments you serve
  2. Understanding the problems, challenges and opportunities prospective buyers in your market are dealing with
  3. Knowing the trends and future issues prospective buyers in your target market(s) will face in the next 1-3 years
  4. Listening to and understanding what your customers are telling you about what’s really going on in their business, not just what new feature/function enhancements they want
  5. Using reliable fact-based research data and industry/market analysis amongst several inputs for making strategic go-to-market decisions
  6. Making strategic decisions across all areas of the company for which market(s) you’re going to serve and the key value propositions your company drives to market
  7. Always using the ‘outside-in’ perspective
  8. Your solutions genuinely create value for your customers
  9. Focusing on where and how your company can excel in selected markets rather than just having a presence in many markets
  10. Developing a corporate mindset of being a trusted advisor for customers and prospects rather than just another vendor of stuff and/or services
  11. All functional areas in the company are aligned around the same go-to-market strategy
  12. Understanding and responding to the buyer’s process while sales retain control of moving the buyer to a decision
  13. Developing long-term customers who want to do business with your company
  14. Using a balanced scorecard approach to measure marketing performance across multiple dimensions
  15. Marketing is the strategic leader in the company and central to the success of the business
The above is not intended to be an exhaustive, scientifically researched list, but IMO represents the key attributes that I would look for to determine whether a company is market-driven.

Marketing has a significantly more strategic and pervasive role in a market-driven company. Performance expectations from marketing are higher and the risk of making wrong go-to-market decisions will derail the company.

“Business has only two functions--marketing and innovation.” – Peter Drucker

An article about the ROI of Being Market-Driven by Pragmatic Marketing cites various sources that market-driven companies are 31% more profitable, twice as fast in getting new products to market, and have 10-20% higher customer satisfaction levels. Seems that the benefits of being market-driven are tremendous, but my anecdotal view is that it may be the least frequent of the four company cultural models discussed in this series of blog posts, particularly in B2B companies.

Do you work in a market-driven company – how does it work in your company?
(use the comment link below to share your thoughts on this topic)
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Marketing in a ‘Customer-driven’ company

Following on from my previous three posts on company culture drivers; this post looks at the ‘customer-driven’ company and how Marketing functions in this type of environment.

This is not about being customer focused, providing great customer service, creating value for your customers, listening to customers and all the other good things related to taking excellent care of your customers. This context of customer-driven is about companies who are slavishly dedicated to serving their customers to the extent that their business strategy and culture is driven by their customers.

The customer-driven company culture is prevalent in smaller companies where the founder started the company with a contract for the first customer, added more customers, grew the business, but essentially does what the customers want. There are however a surprising number of large and public companies who are basically customer-driven. A key characteristic is that the company is dependent on a relatively small number of customers for the vast majority of its revenue. So, while customers get ultimate service and attention, the company has limited scalability, high risk exposure to various changes in customer companies and limited control over product and go-to-market strategy.

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.
By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.” Steve Jobs

These companies are likely to have a collection of ‘markets of one’ – i.e. each customer (or small sub-group of customers) is essentially its own market segment. While there is usually a common thread across these customers, they don’t comprise a market in the usual manner. These ‘markets of one’ and lack of the usual market scalability, heavily influence marketing options and approaches.

Marketing in these companies seems to be focused on two main areas:
  1. Retention – while customer retention should be a high priority for all companies, it is particularly critical for companies that depend on a relative small number of customers. Marketing programs such as newsletters, free educational events, customer conferences, satisfaction surveys and featuring customers in trade publication articles appear to be most common. If customers pay recurring support or maintenance or other types of retainer fees, then marketing must run programs that emphasize the value customers receive from these fees.
  2. Cross-Selling – marketing campaigns to sell more products and/or services to existing customers. The key is to focus on complementary or additive solutions relevant to each customer’s situation.
New customer acquisitions tend to be more opportunistic and generally not driven by a significant marketing campaign.

A good approach for improving marketing effectiveness in customer-driven companies is to reach more people in different roles in customer companies. But you shouldn’t just send the same stuff to more people – it should be personalized and/or role-based materials that connect to each individual’s responsibilities. This will enable developing greater exposure, more customer advocates, more buyers and ultimately better retention and more sales from existing customers.

Do you work in a customer-driven company as defined here – what’s your marketing approach?
(use the comment link below to share your thoughts on this topic)

Next post, a look at marketing in a market-driven company.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com

Marketing in a ‘Sales-driven’ company

Following on from my previous posts How is your company ‘driven’? and Marketing in a Competitor-driven company – this post looks at the ‘sales-driven’ company and how Marketing functions in this type of company culture.

The message and emphasis from the chief person(s) who establish the sales-driven culture is that Sales are in charge and they need to get out and sell something and have marketing support them. That means that the sales teams are generally empowered to pursue whatever business they can and sign deals for just about any products and potential customers.

Salespeople typically do what they’re comfortable with and done for years – they sell in the same way that worked before. Markets shift, demand dries up, customers move on, but Sales keeps plugging away doing what they’ve always done. Marketing is viewed as supporting sales, to provide collateral, generate leads, help respond to RFPs, and other tactical functions.

“More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent
their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.” Gertrude Stein

I think sales-driven is the most challenging environment for Marketing. In many cases, the head of Marketing reports to the COO who in many organizations is really the head of sales. While the marketing operational activities to generate leads are understood and mostly appreciated by Sales in a sales-driven company, it is the positioning, messaging, value propositions and other strategic direction that is challenging for marketing to get buy-in from sales.

Marketing should and usually wants to provide direction on what to sell, where to sell it, who to sell it to, how to sell it, why customers would buy, and other strategies to be more effective and productive, by directing and enabling Sales to pursue the right opportunities in a manner that connects with current market circumstances. However, sales-driven companies are more inclined to rather add channel capacity to drive more sales even though it’s less effective long term. I cringe when marketing runs a campaign for a very specific value proposition, prospects raise their hands, marketing cultivates the leads, and then the salesperson engages a prospect with “so, you’re interested in buying our super-duper (or whatever) product…”.

The other challenge is that product direction is often driven by the needs of current prospects to get a sale – not a good direction for long-term business success.

Don’t get me wrong, Marketing is there to drive sales revenue and new opportunities for the company and enable Sales be successful. However, a sales-driven culture obstructs and constrains Marketing from being a truly effective and valuable contributor to the long-term company success – more on this in an upcoming post on being market-driven.

Seems to me that sales-driven is the default way to go for many companies?

Do you work in a sales-driven company – what’s your marketing approach, how do you deal with these challenges?
(use the comments link below to share your thoughts on this topic)

Next post, a look at marketing in a customer-driven company.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com