Stop Blaming Marketing

My recent article, Stop Blaming Sales, received a few comments from sales type folks - asserting that I was 'right on', that marketing should not be given responsibility for websites, for corporate positioning - that marketing was pretty much worthless.

I was kinda surprised by those comments - they were pretty far out of context from my own thoughts as I created that post. So - here I am again, discussing the flip-side of that statement.

Stop Blaming Marketing!

Enough already - the Enemy is Out There folks. I've been both a successful enterprise sales rep (I sold mainframes against IBM) and a successful marketer. I can tell you that you need both teams working together to drive revenue. I can also tell you that while many sales people think they can do marketing -it's not that easy and most great sales people aren't really marketers.

Why?

Because great sales people serve their customers viewpoint - and sometimes they take it as the Holy Grail. Sales reps are focused on doing whatever it takes to drive shorter-term revenue and customer relationships. That includes focusing on the needs of their specific clients, revenue opportunities and strategies for success. They live and breathe the current, day-to-day worlds of their customers and prospects. As the customer advocate, they support their customers' perspectives, share their views, follow their lead and serve their customers. They listen to what customers say about their own company and competitors, and they integrate those beliefs into their own.

That's all great and as it should be. But that's not what marketing does, not by a long shot.

Before you get all huffy, yes, marketing should be based on customers' success. Yes, marketing has to understand their customer and prospect audience. Yes marketing has to listen.

Marketing also has to represent a broad base of perspectives, across diverse customers and prospects and the market in general - for today and tomorrow. Marketing has to vet all of those perspectives to derive the reality, the optimum perspective and positioning for the overall company - today and in the future. What a customer says to a sales rep to drive discounts/deals is usually not the best basis for your company's future. Yet, for a single sales rep, or a sales team - those perspectives may indeed be their most important focus.

So, how can we all work together?

Marketing thinks about today, tomorrow and next year. For ALL it's audiences - current and potential. Marketing's role is to keep the company on track for market strategy, positioning and evidence at the macro business level - for all markets. Marketing delivers the materials that best reflect that short and longer-term corporate and product position - that's been blessed at an executive level.

Sales takes that strategy, positioning and evidence, then applies it to a subset of the company's audience -their own specific customers and target prospects. Which often is a very distinct subset of the overall audience.

Here's where the rub can start.

• Sometimes the company's direction and the specific sales audience (e.g., older customers that we're moving away from) don't jive. So sales, as the customer advocate, blames marketing. What marketing delivered isn't what they need - so marketing sucks. (Can I use that work on a blog?)

• Marketing is focused on a broad audience and delivers against that plan. When sales asks for something they view as down in the minutiae, they cry foul and blame sales for not following their plan.

• Sales doesn't have the customer stories they need to focus on their specific segment, they can't prove the value so they discount to get a deal. Marketing points fingers and wonders why sales isn't 'value-selling'.

We've all seen these stories and more - so I'm not going to spend time on the examples.

My point? Marketing and Sales need to get over themselves and stop with the finger pointing. Period. Communication and understanding is the key. Here are some ideas I use to bring these teams together in my clients:

• Sales has to help marketing people get out on sales calls to experience first hand the sales process. Sales needs to stop building walls between marketing and their precious customers and get with the team approach. So what if that product marketer doesn't know how to sell to customers. TEACH them. That's how they learn how to help you. Treating them like a pariah and leaving them in corporate is only adding to the sales disconnect.

• Marketing folks need to include sales more prominently in the marketing process. That way sales learns more about the overall goals and strategies and flow within marketing. They get to comment and be included. That builds lot better working relationship than when marketing throws 'stuff' over the wall at sales as if they were mushrooms to be fed in a closet.

• Both teams need to start communicating and including each other, versus excluding and blaming. We all need to focus on one thing - WINNING for the company. That's what we're paid to do.

Great companies need both organizations to function, preferably working together, to thrive. So stop blaming each other and change the attitude.

We're all on the same side, after all.