Having spent a decent proportion of my career in both sales and marketing I feel relatively well qualified to write this particular post. I don’t feel too bad about the title either as I’m sure someone has called me a fluffy bunny at some point although, I’d have to protest if I’d even been called a golfing slacker as I simply have no clue which end of a golf club is the business end. But I digress and so to the topic in hand which might equally be entitled:
‘Sales and marketing and never the twain shall meet (or think the other adds a shred of value)…’
Of course it’s a slight generalisation but not so much from my own experience. Read any decent management thinking on the roles of sales and marketing and most experts will tell you that these two essential functions are part of the same overall objective which is to drive revenues. There must be a million and one analogies for portraying how these two work together, but I like to think of it as a team of two working to break rocks. Marketing expertly positions the rock and sales bring down the sledge hammer. Hopefully the rock breaks and marketing doesn’t end up with its fingers in a splint. At least that’s the general idea.
Inevitably though, and in part due to the way marketing is often structured in big tech corporates, there are broken fingers and a lot of peripheral damage when the sledge hammer misses its target. The truth is that it’s rarely either party’s fault. The fluffy bunnies are generally the victims of ruthless cost-saving that manifests itself as ‘efficient centralisation’ and the golfing slackers…well, they probably perform a miracle everyday to deliver the numbers.
So, let’s deal with the first travesty and its implications. Centralisation of the marketing function. First of all let’s take a broad brush look at where ‘the numbers’ come from. In the telecommunications product and services space it’s pretty reasonable to look at the pareto principle, meaning that 80% of revenues come from 20% of the customer base. Next it’s worth taking a look at the tools that strategic accounts (and in particular those that are driving those big revenue streams) have at their finger tips. The tools that any ‘normal business’ would use to achieve ‘competitive advantage’, which is another way of saying being ‘strategically relevant’ to customers. Before we go on let’s get some perspective on these sales accounts. If we are talking about a global tier 1 vendor then we are most likely talking about an account that generates more revenue than a FTSE 250 company - in other words 100’s of millions. It would be strange to think of a company of this size without a dedicated marketing function supporting sales, yet this is pretty much the norm in major account sales structures.
Just to be completely accurate, it’s not that these ‘flagship’ strategic accounts don’t have access to marketing resource - because they do. The issue is rather how effective the marketing resource is when sales account teams tap into it. That already sounds damning, but it’s not really the fault of the individuals. When dedicated marketing support is removed from top strategic account teams and centralised, one simple thing happens:
Marketing becomes GENERIC
To the best of my knowledge you’d never find Seth Godin nor Philip Kotler flying the flag for vanilla marketing. These days, more ever than before, customers want to work with vendors that understand their situation, market and strategy. Equally, strategic account teams strive permanently to achieve ‘relevancy’. Generic marketing serves neither customers nor account teams well. On that simple basis, it’s often where the name calling begins and it shouldn’t. Sales want customised relevance and marketeers want the time and flexibility to deliver the kind of targeted support that really will make a difference to their golfing colleagues (joke).
If we are hellbent on finger pointing perhaps it should be at the CMO who, in the interest of saving a buck here and a buck there, decided to pull back the most important resource that could directly affect sales relevancy in the 20% of customers who drive 80% of revenues.
Just saying…