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

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

How is your company ‘driven’?

I frequently hear people categorize their company as being “customer-driven” or “we’re a sales-driven company” or “we’re definitely a market-driven culture” or something like that. I’m always tempted to ask 2 questions; “so what does that really mean for how you operate?” and “how does that impact your approach in marketing?” The curious thing is that when you do ask these questions you frequently get wishy-washy answers. So, being analytical and curious, I did some checking a couple of years ago to find out what these categories of how companies perceive they are driven really mean and more importantly, what it means for how you approach marketing.

Every business has a company culture, usually established by the founder/owner/CEO/executive team or similar chief person(s). One of the many facets of company culture is this categorization of how the business is driven. What you usually find is the chief person’s professional career is the primary determinant of the culture. Yes, other factors such as their background, education, culture, personal beliefs, etc. do play a role too, but their career experience seems to have the most influence. Therefore, a chief person who came up through the sales organization will generally establish a ‘sales-driven’ culture while someone with mostly customer service or consulting career experience may establish a ‘customer-driven’ culture.

Seems to me there are 4 major types of company culture drivers:

1. Competitor-driven
2. Sales-driven
3. Customer-driven
4. Market-driven

Sure there are other drivers such as product, engineering, innovation, etc. but IMO they’re a subset of one of these majors. While none of these are necessarily wrong or bad, there are ramifications for the organization overall and associated limitations that may not be readily apparent in some of these.

Companies could evolve through different cultures as the business matures and evolves in the marketplace – for example, a company founded on a competitor-driven premise of providing cheaper alternative products, may move to sales-driven as their market share increases and eventually to market-driven with their own product innovations establishing market leadership.

My next 4 posts on this blog will explore each category in more detail and discuss the implications for marketing supporting each type.
Copyright © 2009 The Marketing Mélange and Ingistics LLC. http://marketing.infocat.com