Hard Marketing Truth: Your Org Chart is Wrong

Tell me if this sounds familiar to you:

Product Team to Marketing: “We just finished this amazing new feature, its taken us over 2 years to get it right, you need to get the word out NOW about it!”

Marketing: “Ok what’s the new feature?”

Product: “Are you ready??Our customers can now change the font size on our app!”

Marketing: “ok and?”

Product: “ok and what??That’s it, it's taken us hours of programming to get that right and you need to get more leads to justify the time spent!”

Marketing: “Ok we will go to market with that amazing new feature and watch the $$ roll in!” (Ok that was what the outside voice said, the inside one said, “WTF seriously?”)

This is a typical case that gets played out time and again when an organization is structured around “products” instead of customers.

We have the Product Marketing Manager for Product A and B and C and all of them target the same buyer, but those managers have a narrow focus on marketing for those products.?They usually don’t see the big picture because that’s not their defined role.?Manager A doesn’t get a pat on the back for selling more of Product B, so why should they bother?

Now, what if the org chart had Audience Manager A B and C??Their job focus would be on what their audience needs, and then how their company’s solutions fit those needs.?They would combine various products into a solution that allows the Audience Marketing Manager to communicate real value.?

Take this a step further and push the entire org to be focused on the different major audience types.?Can the Product development team have a person who advocates for their Audience Type during the dev process??Can Sales be organized around this concept as well?

It comes back to the fundamental question of: Does your company really know whom they are targeting with their products??Can the entire org come to an agreement on that and let it change the way they do business?

The benefits of this type of focus change are many, including:

• Expertise developed across the org on how a target buys and uses your products
• Messaging targeted to the non-technical needs of a target audience and more to the emotional and/or situational needs.?Put this another way, it becomes about a solution, not just the specs.
• Reporting becomes more streamlined since everyone is looking at the same market (based on an agreed-upon definition).
• You minimize the situation of “The Ads said one thing, my Sales rep said another, and the Product didn’t deliver on either!” that customers get into.

I’m sure there are other benefits that I am not thinking of here so feel free to add them in the comments.?I would love to hear about things your company has done to improve.