“No company in its right mind tries to sell to everyone” – Philip Kotler
For more from Jennifer Davis on sales and marketing, read "How to Market "Marketing": A Primer For Business People Who Market."
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See this article in Forbes on how one company, Suterra and their leader, Melinda Sych, puts the customer in the center of their marketing and sales efforts.
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At the heart of every successful customer-centric company is that they get paid for paying attention: to the needs of their customers and to the things that result in internal efficiency and effectiveness. By learning faster, while staying on strategy and on message, the results and rewards can be substantial.
What can a purpose-driven chemical company in a highly-regulated and competitive market teach you about building a customer-centric culture and driving great results? More than you might suspect.
Suterra offers biorational and healthy pest management alternatives for the agricultural industry and is a division of The Wonderful Company , a $4 billion private corporation comprised of healthy brands across consumer and industrial segments. Melinda Sych has served as the vice president of Commercial Operations for four years and is responsible for marketing and sales for Suterra, building on her engineering and business management experience at Dow Chemical, Asahi, and SEH.
In our recent interview, she shared several key principles that have been deployed at Suterra that are instructive for anyone wanting to foster customer obsession in their organization.
1. Focus for Impact
Suterra makes products that allow growers to reduce crop damage and increase their profits and output with healthy alternative pest management solutions. In her first days at the company, Sych met with customers to better understand the business. “When a customer told me that we were everything to everyone and nothing to anyone, it was telling,” she recalled. It was clear they needed a strategy to improve their chances of success and exceptional customer experience where it mattered most.
“Defining for your business what you are going to do is also defining what you are not going to do or what you are no longer willing to do,” Sych instructed. “And that focus must be for the business and for the functions.” Sych added that “you need to be able to answer the question, ‘Why aren’t we doing that?’” in a consistent way across the whole organization. This is easier said than done. Especially when customers themselves ask you for solutions outside your focus.
David Cooperstein, who ran the marketing leadership practice at Forrester and now provides strategic advisory services to startups and mid-stage companies with his company Figurr, has seen the same tension in companies across multiple industries. “It takes discipline to be willing to say that they can’t serve a particular vertical right now,” he shared in a recent interview. “Successful companies always pick a tight market to focus on, then expand once they have mastered each category.”
Sych summed up what this kind of discipline has meant to Suterra:
The success of focus is remembering that you can’t do everything and if you try, you are not going to do it well. As a leader, you need to remind your team what you are doing to accomplish your mission and be the best. The reason we aren’t doing other things is that it would dilute our ability to achieve the mission. There are millions of businesses that have tried to do everything and failed at everything. We want only to be the best of the best at our purpose. This helps not only build our brand with our customers, but also our employees, shareholders, and the industry.”
Advice you can use: Decide what your business is going to do and what you won’t do. And have the discipline and courage to stick with your strategy. You have to believe that focus will make you more successful when your resolve is tested.
2. Go Deep With the Customer
Increasingly in competitive markets, businesses are differentiating on experience and that requires a deep understanding of the customer. At Suterra “it’s all about the customer experience,” Sych said. “We want them to love using our products and to see it result in damage reduction. We must understand them.”
In their highly-technical sales they “take market analysis, competitive insights, product details and understanding of the customer problem, and we decide how we are going to position the product and what the typical use looks like in different segment markets,” Sych explained. For instance, in grapes alone there are many segments, Sych described, including various grades of wine grapes, table grapes, and raisins. The channels to market, the price points, likely applications, and the varietals vary widely across those segments. Suterra’s marketers need to have data to show the efficacy of the product in the most likely use cases. “The marketers work with our technical teams to understand agricultural practices in the segments and to gather the data required to properly position our products in our target segments,” Sych explained. They ask themselves “what makes the most sense and will have the most impact?” and they then target the use cases that have the highest impact on the management of a pest in that target segment. “We then price according to our principle of accessible return on investment,” she concluded.
This process is very involved when you need to prove outcomes with science and research as Suterra’s market requires. “In our highly-regulated business, there are lengthy product development cycles and sales processes,” Sych described. “We need to facilitate conversations with many parties and people to get feedback. For instance, we ask sales, customers, business development, and others for feedback on our labels, messaging, and use cases so that we can achieve our objectives.”
Launching product in this context requires highly segmented messaging, ROI data, and efficacy data aimed at the different decision makers for the different markets and extensive sales training to deliver the message. “In order to do this, we need to understand how our product makes our customers’ lives harder and easier,” Sych observed. “What equipment or products they will need to be successful. What support services they need to make it easier to use and more readily adapted across our key target segments." All of that insight comes through deep understanding of the customer.
Yet, even businesses without the regulatory requirements for evidence, need to provide reasons for customers to purpose the products or services that rely on a deep understanding of the customer needs.
Advice you can use: Whether your development cycle is three years or three days, whether you are selling B2B or to consumers, use that time to get feedback from key stakeholders and understand deeply the customer problem at which your solution is aimed.
3. Differentiate with Brand Experience
When Sych visited those first customers she asked why they bought the product. They answered “because it works.” She saw that as something to build upon.
“We are seen as an innovator and are often first to market,” Sych said with pride. “But competitors watch the filings and we only can count on a few year head start, as our compounds can not generally be protected with patents.” Suterra’s products are based on science often discovered and researched in university settings.
“If you can’t patent the inventions, then your messaging and brand is your differentiation,” Sych concluded.
This creates a high-stakes scenario where speed to market matters. “When anyone complains about others copying our work, I just ask ‘how can we do it better?’ It ups the game,” Sych observed. “Being first gives us the chance to learn about weaknesses in the market that we need to address. Competition makes us better by putting us on our toes and making us ready to respond,” she suggested. As a result of the competitive pressures Suterra’s “sales and marketing teams are listening better for information, they are analyzing, they are digging into nit-picky details, and they are paying attention,” Sych commented.
Instead of paying patent attorneys, we are paying attention to our customers.”
And what has been the result of this customer-focus? “Having a strong brand speeds up the time to market even in our highly regulated industry,” Sych remarked. The EPA and state registration and efficacy tests take time, but the market adoption curve can vary widely. “We just launched a new citrus product two years ago,” she recalled. “It went from nothing to 70% market share in two selling seasons after registration.” The credibility and customer confidence they had built in the brand, had earned them customer loyalty and trust and allowed them to over-achieve their sales targets. “We asked for pre-orders for this new product and were pleasantly shocked to book 95% of our annual sales by January of the year,” she added.
Advice you can use: Don’t focus too much on the competition and whether you have defensible protection. It can trap you into looking backward and may not be as secure as you would hope. Rather, focus on being the fastest learners in the marketplace for sustainable advantage.
4. Partner Internally
Cooperstein added that in his experience “the sales teams look to marketing for guidance. They want to know how to tell a better story than others in their space and how to win more business.” In short, “Sales needs to carry the company message, not just the sales numbers.”
Sych agrees on this kind of partnership and noted that at Suterra “Marketing is setting the message and Sales is responsible for delivering.”
The needs and roles of sales and marketing, even when they are part of the same organization as they are at Suterra, are different and require open partnership. “Field salespeople are busy and are dealing with day-to-day issues of their customers,” Sych said. “Marketing people are back in the office thinking it will be simple to follow the approach they have recommended.” In many companies, this can lead to silo thinking, pointing fingers, and breakdowns in relationships. In fact, InsideView’s Report “The State of Sales and Marketing Alignment in 2018” noted that negative perceptions between the groups leave 28% of sellers thinking they would do a better of marketing than their marketing colleagues and 23% of marketers believing they would do a better job of selling. However, the truth is that the groups need each other to be successful.
“There is a connection and dependency throughout the business and between sales and marketing,” Sych noted. “Whether they are on a single team or separated, they should be reminded that they need each other.”
In order for marketing to be successful, we have to hit our revenue targets. In order for sales to be successful, we need to have messaging and tools in the market. They should be incentivized together.”
Beyond having common goals, Suterra has created positions to act as bridges between sales and marketing. “Having people who own the products through the product launch helps facilitate sales success by improving the visibility of how this approach is being received by the market and allowing us to adjust our message or approach to better optimize the results in real time,” she commented.
Speaking to marketers, Sych had some final advice: “Marketing organizations have to be strong to do their job well. Confidence in the marketing organization is earned and learned.” Successful launches in which marketing and sales both see their unique contributions, help reinforce this confidence and mutual respect.
Advice you can use: Make sure the sales and marketing organization (or organizations) know how they win together and align goals and incentives. Celebrate the wins together and build upon that success.
I saw the new Mission: Impossible movie yesterday and was struck by how often Ethan Hunt, the hero played by Tom Cruise, stopped to see, empathize, and protect his team mates and the innocent bystanders of his action shenanigans. Seeing them as people, not as obstacles on his parkour course chasing bad guys.
It was a good reinforcement of some ideas from a book (recommended to me by Jennifer Daniels) called The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute. In it, they provocatively call the objectifying of people as an act of violence itself, as thoughts precede behavior.
What does this have to do with sales and marketing alignment? Well, everything.
I have been writing for Forbes on the topic of alignment and customer-centricity, showcasing insights from different marketing, sales, and business leaders across the country, from brands big and small. I still have a lot to share (stay tuned for some great upcoming pieces), but even in these early weeks of my research I am struck with how often the problem that manifests as misalignment is one of perspective.
Harkening back to high school geometry, here is the step-by-step proof:
We can only solve problems we can see.
In frustration or impatience, we see each other as the problem.
When we see each other as the problem, we stop seeing the real problem.
As we don't see the problem as it truly is, we can never really solve it.
In a lesson today, Dr. Mark Brewer, reminded us that in relationships you can’t think “you are the problem” or “I am the problem,” you have to think “it’s you and me against the problem.”
When we see each other through the lens (or should I say the monocle) of the problem, we no longer see the person. They are the problem. They are objectified. They are a caricature without the complexities inherent in humanity. We see them and the issue in 2D. Over-simplified. And as a result, our minds are tuned to seek and find hardship. We are often chasing evidence of how we’ve been wronged. None of which is useful to problem solving.
In contrast, when we see the problem through the lenses of more than one expert (as you can when you are on the same side of the table, instead of opposite sides), the problem can be fully explored in 3D. The people remain people (not obstacles to overcome) and our minds are tuned to solutions and finding common ground.
We see what we seek.
This does not mean that sometimes our colleagues are not very good at their jobs or that some people are difficult to work alongside. There are times when people do have ill intensions or have broken our trust. Sometimes role changes or people moves are required to get to solution and this can be achieved with sensitivity and respect. But in any case, confronting reality, both the good and the bad, together leads to better outcomes in my experience.
I heard of an example recently where a high-performing executive at a prominent company decided to take a side step into a supporting role in recognition that the business needed something beyond what he could give. This highly admirable act demonstrates not only self-awareness and servant leadership, but also the commitment to face the truth and follow that truth to whatever conclusions are best for the business.
This kind of openness and frank communication can re-center the organization on the “why” of your business or project, what success looks like, and what is required to move forward.
Ray Padron recently shared a quote from Gail Hyatt which posed that “people lose their way, when they lose their why.” So true.
And ironically, the best way to find your “why” is to start with your “who.” After all, you can’t be obsessed about your customers, if you don’t know who they are. You can’t set priorities or align your time and resources to high-impact projects, if you don’t know who you are serving. You can't own your business, if you are seeking others to blame. And we can’t determine or achieve the “why” of our business without the people “who” are our colleagues, team mates, stakeholders, and co-collaborators.
Our mission, should we accept it, is to see people as people and to find a way together.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
In my latest Forbes article, I interviewed Martyn Etherington from Teradata. Read the full article here.
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Martyn Etherington knows what it takes to drive change from the office of the CMO and has plenty of lessons for new chief marketing officers. In fact, he himself is practicing being new. Six short months ago he joined Teradata, a data analytics company, drawing upon his extensive executive marketing experiences at IBM (Sequent Computer Systems), Danaher (Tektronix), Mitel Networks, and Cisco Systems
Being new on the executive team, the need to align sales and marketing, a perennial priority, is even more sharply in focus. “Sales and marketing can be like the Montagues and Capulets from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet,” Etherington joked. Even at the best run companies, alignment is hard won.
Etherington’s priorities these first few months he believes have set the foundation for the alignment that will be needed for transformation and hold some lessons for any CMO starting with a new company.
Goal Setting – tied to revenue and relationships
“The relationship between sales and marketing can also be, at times, as Winston Churchill described the U.S. and U.K., ‘two nations separated by a common language,’” he continued. “The key is shared language and goals,” not just perceptions. “We have one shared goal and that is ‘Growth’,” he summarized.
Etherington emphasizes that marketing should have intimacy with the business and that compensation should be tied to their sales peers’ goals. “I want them to know where are we regarding revenue, quarter to date, year to date,” he explains. “Are we growing quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year? Are we growing at or above market? Are we taking share? How does our collective sales funnel look?” For this, he looks at the size, shape, velocity, and quality of the overall pipeline and then asks “How can we help improve the funnel?” to keep the focus on action. As he has found “without these KPIs, without this insight and intimacy of our business, we are stumbling in the dark.”
Every organization would like to get better at attribution, but Etherington is “less concerned with perfect attribution, or optics. I would much rather spend time determining our impact on the funnel and top-line growth,” he said. It starts and ends with setting good Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and a desire to “do good, not just look good.”
“Other than my boss, my number one priority was the partnership with my sales peer Eric Tom, our chief revenue officer,” Etherington offers. And those relationships extend through the sales organization and across between leaders in sales and marketing.
Etherington suggests that a good way to begin these conversations in your first few days on the job is to ask sales peers the following question: “If we were to nuke marketing, what would happen to our business?” This can solicit a range of responses, all useful for building a relationship and getting on the same page as to the priorities.
“Sometimes you get the answer ‘nothing would happen.’ Others attribute a portion of their sales results to marketing,” Etherington recalls. He has found that based on his B2B marketing experience, “organizations believe that, ideally, that they should get 20-30 percent of their funnel from marketing.” Some industries vary depending on the complexities of their offerings, sales cycle and whether they have a direct or indirect or blended go-to-market strategy, but no matter how much reliance there is on marketing to build the pipeline, it is important to create positive dependencies between marketing and sales that ties back to those shared goals and the relationships that are being fostered between the functions.
Teradata has an enterprise focus and sells direct. The sales are consultative and high touch. In this model, it may be more simple to track attribution to marketing than other go-to-market models, but it still requires vigilance and a focus on the right things. “Transparency is key,” he adds. “You need operational rigor around your own metrics. They need to be real and they need to be metrics that you can manage versus just monitoring.” As I have also found in my career, marketing has lots of things they can measure, but not all things that are measurable are important or lead to action. “We are interested in conversion and ultimately conversion," he continued. "That is more important to us than vanity metrics like touch points. We want to work with our sales peers to drive growth.”
Culture – a mindset change supported by systems
“You can pontificate all you like about alignment, insight, impact and effectiveness, but you have to have a business perspective, an appetite for operational rigor and a culture of continuous improvement to affect change,” Etherington challenged. You have to operationalize the strategic plan, with the right structures and systems in place, to achieve it. He has worked for companies with exacting business operating systems, like Danahar, with red, yellow, and green dashboard indicators and he has taken the opportunity to apply best practices of lean to his team at Teradata for strategy deployment, KPIs, action plans, and “root cause countermeasure” approaches. “We implemented weekly stand-ups and have begun a standard monthly marketing operations review to make sure we are making progress and attaining our KPI planned metrics,” he explained.
Cultures are known to change slowly. “We are at the beginning of a journey,” Etherington said. “We have begun our transformation. We have our strategic objectives in place, aligned with our company goals. We have our KPIs defined and populated, we have supporting action plans and forums for us to inspect and improve.” It’s a start, but there is more to do. “We don’t have all the answers,” he continued. “How much can we say that we contribute to our business? With only our first monthly marketing operations review under our belt, I can say not as much as we ought to be. Now we know where we are, our jumping off point, we have only one way to go!”
Any experienced executive will tell you that change - at the scale of a business transformation and a redefinition of what marketing means to an organization overall - can test the patience of the leadership and the organization. It can lead to organizational fatigue, misalignment, or impatience to rush to answers when the problems are not yet fully understood. Etherington finds that the power to achieve results first begins with a willingness to see the problems, in blaring detail, and face them head-on.
“One of the biggest challenges when moving from activity-based marketing to outcome-based marketing is the transparency, accountability, and responsibilities that come with that approach,” he explains. “We are in the infancy of our marketing effectiveness journey and most of our KPIs are currently in red.” The ambitions of the organizations and the standards set by the team are not yet reflected in the reality of the business. “That is not a comfortable feeling for many people,” he observed. “We are all raised to covet the gold star or turn a red metric into the green.” Everyone wants to do well and wants to do well as quickly as possible.
“One philosophy ingrained in me from my time at Danaher was the notion of ‘living in the red.’ In monthly operations reviews, if your KPI was green, we did not talk about it. It’s good. It’s at plan. What we wanted to discuss was the red KPIs - the variances from plan.” Living in the red means to ask questions like:
- What is the cause of the miss?
- What are the corrective actions underway?
- Are we making progress against our goal?
- Are the specifics in the supporting action plans to ensure we are executing strongly towards the KPI?
- Are we stretching enough?
The focus needs to be constantly brought back into focus on the things that need attention, action, or course correction. “It could be many months before that KPI would go to green, but it forces you to think differently, adopt a growth mindset and be ok, although not comfortable, being in the red,” Etherington instructed. “The confidence comes as you use the tools and know that with applied discipline eventually, you will achieve sustainable results.” Etherington knows this from experience. “It works," he advocates. "It is proven and has been to a large part a major contributor to my success and some of the companies for which I have worked.” Leaders have to be comfortable being uncomfortable and help their organizations do the same.
Of course, there are a host of strategies and tactics within these organizing principles that the CMO and teams need to implement from the start to be successful in the new role and for years to come. Seeking out data to inform decisions, building a great team and structuring them for success, influencing and being influenced by customers, and building a culture of continuous improvement take judgment and time. Focusing on the shared goals, and the systems and mindsets required to achieve them, even if they are uncomfortable at first, is a great place to start for any new CMO leading an organization to green.
My latest article for Forbes has been published. In it, I speak candidly with CMOs and marketing leaders about how to have more influence in their organization. The perennial topic of "marketing marketing" is a key one across businesses and industries. It requires great cross-functional partnerships, communication, and, most importantly, a keen sense of self. I haven't ever done it perfectly, but has learned lessons through the years that may be of use to others.
Check my page on Forbes for all of the recent articles.
Special thanks to many leaders, mentors, and friends who have influenced my thinking on this topic, including Steve Buhaly, Angela Dowling, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Gerry Perkel, Amy Walker Barrs, Alyssa Gasca, Wade Clowes, Sam Runco, Ben Clifton, Jerry Viera, Carolyn McKnight, Douwe Bergsma, Erick Petersen, Jerry Dawson, Steve Bryan, Mick Connolly, Tanya Young Stump, Paul Gulick, Steve Seminario, Rob Baumgartner, Adam Schmidt, Karen Howells, Samantha Phenix, Susan Clark, Rob Morton, Jon Quillard, Esther Diez, William Efird, Julie Naster, William Walker, Greg Turnbull, Jack Raiton, Zach Zhang, Victor Li, Kelly Kannwischer, Teresa Caro, Helene Lollis, Dan Bruton, Terry Trover, Mark Ceciliani, Rob Stewart, Doug Barnes, Patrick Herguth, Annie Ho, and many, many more. I am also indebted to authors Seth Godin, Patrick Lencioni, Eli Goldratt, Barry Trailer, Jon Maeda, Clayton Christensen, Danny Meyer, Ben Horowitz, Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, Gino Wickman, Michael Watkins, and Guy Kawasaki for their insights. Although I have been blessed with great counsel, the opinions expressed here are my own.
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You can’t talk about sales and marketing alignment without addressing the topic of “marketing marketing.” Some companies devalue marketing, considering it sales support or the group that makes things pretty (the “arts and crafts department” as a friend once quipped). Other companies strongly value the strategic importance of marketing in branding, product roadmap, strategic planning, and industry thought leadership. I have been blessed to work for organizations that model the latter, but I certainly am familiar with the former.
Forgive my tough love, but if you are a marketer and want to do a better job of marketing marketing in your organization (and building your own personal brand in the process), here are five questions to get you on the right path.
1. Would you having a seat at the decision-making table improve the company results?
You may be a great third baseman, knowing all the throwing and catching moves that make someone fantastic at executing this role in a baseball game, but if you don’t know how to read the scoreboard, understand sports commentary, or know how your actions impact the outcome of the game, you are not a very strong ball player. Similarly, if you don’t know how the score is kept in your business, you may not yet deserve a seat at the table to influence decision making.
You must remember you are a business person. No matter your role in the company. When you are pitching a new idea or defending your budget, can you frame the results you hope to achieve in financial terms? Are you prepared to advise senior leadership to make strong economic decisions?
Now, this emphasis on financial results doesn’t prevent being a hands-on, servant leader who knows the technical details of the functional work and gets things done. That is required. It doesn’t prevent a business from having a strong mission, culture, and a balanced scorecard that includes giving back in the community. That is increasingly critical. But if you are tasked with allocating resources, you should be able to describe it in the language and thought process of a business leader.
Best advice: Lead with the financials. Don’t put them in the back of your deck or neglect to make a business case for the things you are doing. Tell your peers and boss what they can expect in return for the investments you are advocating, whether that be revenue, profit, lifetime customer value, or some other economic driver that your shareholders value. And if you aren’t sure how to do this, learn. Get a mentor. Take a class. Ask your CFO to lunch. Read a book. Be curious about the economic impact of your choices and let that guide your thinking.
2. What is the perception of you and that of marketing in your organization?
Before you would embark on a brand-building campaign, you would begin with data to identify the "as is" state and some visioning to determine "to be" state, so that the gap could be identified and closed with careful planning and execution. Often this “as is” state is determined with surveys, voice of the customer, share of voice analysis, or other tools, both formal and informal. Why not do the same thing within your organization to gauge how far away your brand perception within organization is from what you envision as the ideal?
I also know that many business people have scars from previous wounds in the battle to align sales and marketing. You may be in an organization where the marketing function is mistrusted or undervalued, and that was true long before you were on the scene. Making positive change in this environment requires more individual attention: to understand where detractors are coming from, their concerns, and how to lead the organization forward.
Best advice: Know your strengths, weaknesses, and how you are perceived, personally and as a function. Asking a few trusted advisors within the company might give you enough to know your starting place. There are organizations - like Gartner ( CEB ), SiriusDecisions, or consultants - who can assess the strength of your team across a variety of frameworks. Determine how you want to be perceived and take action to close the gaps. Build alignment with peers with by delivering results and with open communication.
3. How are you mentoring and developing your team to be better practitioners and better business people?
You are responsible for the work output and business acumen of your team. Going back to my first point, one of my best practices is to give my marketing teams a primer in reading financial statements. This includes creatives, new college grads and interns, and experienced functional experts brought in for their expertise. As I said, everyone should know how the game of business is played. This is just one example of the learning objectives you can set for your team that set you apart. Other topics for exploration might include new practices in digital demand generation, insights into changing customer preferences, or developing a point of view of how technologies like AI, bitcoin and blockchain might impact your business.
Best advice: Have a learning and development plan for each individual on your team and for the team overall. Assess your talent against your goals to make sure you have the right horsepower to get you there. Don’t be afraid to make changes or redefine roles as necessary. Think critically about what you in-source and outsource, through agencies, contractors, or service vendors to ensure you are maintaining the right amount of capability and curiosity in your organization.
4. What "marketing" does your customer really need?
This should probably be the first question, because anything that isn't seen and appreciated by customers, probably isn't worth doing (besides that which is required for regulatory, legal, or financial compliance). If the customer can’t see it, then it’s waste. What specific value does the customer perceive in the marketing you do?
- Are your empowered customers able to make better and faster decisions because of their access to technical information?
- Are your resellers able to reduce their costs with more accurate quoting resources?
- Are your clients able to achieve business results because of the value proposition of the products and services you provide?
- Are they more loyal because of your differentiated customer service approach?
- Do you make it easy for your customers in ways they value, throughout their customer journey?
Best advice: If you can’t think of examples of adding value that customers perceive, it is time to rethink your strategies. If customers only see themselves being “sold to,” then it is unlikely that you are providing them the value that will lead to long-term loyalty and maximize lifetime customer value. If you can think of solid examples, use these success stories as a platform to build credibility and to inform your investments of time, money, and energy.
and finally...
5. What is working that is worth repeating?
If you want to answer questions 1-4 and put a plan of action in place, a good place to start is to build upon your successes. Where are some situations that have gone well, that you think are worthy of replication and celebration? Use formal employee communications and informal networks to tell the story of the wins. Remember, you serve a role in building positive momentum throughout the whole organization when you market marketing and let everyone participate in the success.
Best advice: Go back and analyze a big order, a design win, a record-setting campaign, or a successful product launch and ask everyone involved how it came to be: the touch points with the organization, what sales tools or marketing resources were used, and what made the difference. Listen for examples of cross-functional teamwork. Use that case study as a cause for recognition, a chance to tell employees about how marketing is playing a role in your shared success, and as an example to replicate in future campaigns or plans. Make sure the CEO and the leadership team knows the story and ask for their help in congratulating those involved in the win.
These questions, and the follow-on discussions they have triggered, have helped develop my leadership and have been useful to leaders I have mentored. What has been your experience? What are your best practices around marketing marketing? Connect on Twitter or LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation.
It's a classic Dilbert cartoon plot line and sadly is very common in so many companies: misalignment between marketing and sales causing waste, confusion, distrust, and poor customer experience.
Whether you are a CEO, head of marketing, or head of sales, find out what misalignment may be costing you and steps you can take to bring the customer back into the center of your business strategy and get sales and marketing working together in active partnership to grow the business.
See a recent presentation that I gave for OnConferences here.
I just returned from a Frost & Sullivan marketing conference in which I participated in discussions around the alignment of sales and marketing. The mere mention of the topic brought out emotions on both fronts and it was clear that done poorly, the relationships devolve into a Dilbert cartoon (or “sock puppet theater” as one presenter noted), with both parties suspecting the others of subterfuge and buffoonery. Marketers are often left wondering how they can better market “marketing” within their organizations and to their leadership teams.
Let’s face it, many companies de-value marketing. Some consider it the department that makes pretty pictures or that it is simply the administrative support for the sales team. Others strongly value the strategic involvement of marketing in product strategy, branding, strategic planning, and industry leadership. I am blessed to work for an organization that models the latter, but I certainly am familiar with the former.
Usually, this lack of respect or understanding for the role of marketing in the organization takes two forms:
- Exclusion from decision making and strategic conversations (a focus on tactical execution only, often exemplified by only having junior marketing staff who report up into another function like sales or G&A)
- Lack of adequate resources to do high-quality marketing work (budget, time, or resource limitations that keep the work tactical and reactionary)
This topic is a big one (worthy of more than one post). To get the conversation started among follow marketers, here are four key questions that you can ask yourself to help you answer the question of how to market “marketing” in your organization.
1. Can you express your motivation for wanting to market marketing in terms of overall business results?
Do you think that investing in a marketing automation system and nurturing campaigns will generate 20% more revenue next year? Do you believe that improving the brand consistency across the organization will lead to higher customer perception of quality and improve gross margins by 2% for the next product launch? Do you believe that developing a new interactive platform for sharing product benefits with your sales channel will reduce the sales cycle by 2 months resulting in a 13% increase in revenue with the same effort? Do you believe that having a seat at the decision making table would improve the company results or employee engagement demonstrably? Can you describe, in plain English or in understandable data, the financial benefits and returns of marketing investments? These are the types of questions you should be asking, when you are thinking of advocating for anything in a business environment. What is the business impact for the change you are advocating?
If you don't know how to answer these questions, it could be an indication that you are not yet ready to advocate for a larger and more impactful role for marketing in your company... and that you should get ready. That in itself, should be a call to action to learn more about your business, your drivers of value in the market, your customer problems, your solutions, revenue or customer attribution models, and overall business strategy...and how score is kept financially in your business. You must strive to be a business person, as well as a marketer. And today, those should be distinguishable.
And don’t be lured into advocating that there is no ROI on marketing investment. That is an archaic way of viewing the world and simply isn’t true. Sure, people have wasted money in “marketing activities” (I’ll get to that below). Sure, some data is just too expensive to get reliably in marketing (and I would argue, in every other function of a business), so business decisions must be made based on the limited information available. But you can describe the financial impact of nearly every decision of your business and marketing is no exception. If you find yourself defending "marketing" without data, go watch the movie Moneyballand see yourself reflected in the dialogue between the salty sports recruiters and Brad Pitt’s character. It’s a new era for business people doing marketing, with more transparency and accountability than ever before, and you must be leading the charge.
2. What is the perception of your brand and that of "marketing" in your organization? What should it be? What is the gap?
Before you would embark on a brand building campaign, you would always begin with data to identify the "as is" state and to quantify the "to be" state. And to identify the gap between these states. Often this accomplished with surveys, voice of the customer, share of voice analysis, or other tools. Why not do the same thing within your organization to gauge how far away the organization is from what you envision as the ideal?
It is also important to know whether your brand is strong enough in the organization to lead that charge? What are you known for, personally, in your organization? Why do people come to you? Does that align with what you need it to be to advocate the change you are advocating? What can you do to change the perception and reputation, if necessary? Are there projects that you need ot delegate to others (ie, the company holiday party, responsibility for the receptionist, etc) to improve the perception of marketing as strategic in your organization? Who else do you need to advocate on your behalf?
3. What "marketing" does your customer really need?
This should probably be the first question, as anything (besides that which is required for regulatory, legal, or financial compliance) that isn't seen and appreciated by customers, probably isn't worth doing. It is the definition of waste and the hallmark of bureaucracy. But coming back to my point, what value does the customer perceive in the marketing you do?
Are your customers able to make better and faster purchase decisions because of their access to technical information? Are your resellers able to sell more because of the sales tools you provide? Are they able to reduce their costs with more accurate quoting resources? Are they able to achieve business results because of the value proposition of the products you provide? Does your marketing help set your company and brand apart in measurable ways?
Some service firms have found that dedicated sales and marketing staff is not nearly as effective as sending their consultants right out to their clients to share expertise directly and we their appetite for more (a topic covered extensively in Patrick Lencioni's book Getting Naked). Some technical engineering firms, web site developers, or agencies find that their engineering teams are best equipped to sell and market to their technical buyers and that all that is needed from marketing is some communication tools to help facilitate these conversations, as learned from colleagues at a recent event held by the Technology Association of Oregon at which I presented on this topic. In our business at Planar, there is a lot of "marketing" that happens in customer conversations with account managers and technical sales professionals in the field. This is good and necessary for our technical, system-style products. Part of the marketing team’s role in this case is to equip their sales colleagues to have these conversations and to aim them at the right targets for best success. Each business will be different, but successful marketing begins with an understanding of the customer.
and finally...
4. What is the winning formula that is worth repeating?
Like any system, it is important to look and inputs and outputs. If you want to answer questions 1-3, a good place to start is your wins. Where are some situations that have gone well that you think are worthy of replication? Go back and analyze a big order, a design win, or project award and ask everyone involved how it came to be, the touchpoints with the organization, what sales tools or marketing resources were used, and what made the difference. There is no sense automating or "improving the efficiency" of things that are not effective. Said another way, finding faster ways to lose money is to find a better way to drive yourself out of business. But, if you focus on what is going right, you will find a platform from which you can advocate smart change and gain the respect of the organization and the resources to replicate what is working. And chances are, if you know it is a winning example that can be replicated, others in the organization will as well, and you will have a common foundation to build trust and understanding.
Special thanks to Lisa Cole, Allison Cerra, Leilani Brown, and Mark Wilson for helping to refine these lessons learned.
The tension between marketing and sales is common enough that it’s a regular theme in Dilbert cartoons, but it doesn’t have to be! Building a strong partnership from product concept all the way to product launch is critical to a company’s success.
Join the Technology Association of Oregon on June 9th for the next Marketing Leadership Exchange. Jennifer Davis, VP or Marketing and Product Strategy, from Planar will discuss how Planar’s marketing and sales teams work together to create and managed shared goals, tracking, idea generation, and how they go about building a strong partnership.
In addition to the valuable content exchange, the Marketing Leadership Exchange is a great way to network with your peers in a safe environment where the top marketing professional at technology companies can openly discuss business issues.
To register for this event, visit the TAO events page.