Marketing is not magic

Alas, I am here to shatter the lie that has been fed to every corporate executive on the planet. Marketing is usually the bearer of bad news, so now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's be more productive, shall we? Let's decide right here and now to work together!

This week I had what I will estimate is my one hundredth conversation with someone who didn't understand marketing's role in a sales process. (For those of you I spoke to this week, this COULD be you, but it's probably not. Anyway, your secret is safe with me.)

This conversation has happened so many times that sometimes I simply want to say "Roll the tape" and play a prerecorded explanation of how they've been misinformed that the marketing unicorn will wave its magic wand and the phone will start ringing off the hook with people desperate to buy a product, service or experience. It just doesn't happen that way. It never has. And you guessed it, it never will.

Marketing is a collaborative effort. We need to understand your goals. A goal is not "I want to do 10 webinars and run 40 ads in the Wall Street Journal about how cool our new autonomous riding lawnmower is!" That is a (bad) tactic. Instead, it would be better if someone came to marketing and said "we need to double our riding lawnmower revenue next year with the launch of the autonomous model. How can we sell more riding lawnmowers?" That's a goal we can work with (and neither webinars nor WSJ ads are the right way to get there)!

We know you're smart; otherwise, you wouldn't have likely gotten to the role you're in (aside from nepotism, cheating or some other unsavory form of climbing the corporate ladder). But so are we, many of us, anyway. It is so rare that you hear someone compliment their marketing team; it's always "marketing's fault." Have you ever stopped to wonder why no marketing team you have ever worked with knew a damn thing? Maybe they were really good at their jobs, but the lack of collaboration caused them to misunderstand your goals. Maybe you didn't reply to their emails or calls when they were seeking feedback.

We want you to succeed. When you hit your revenue goals, we cheer and are happy to have contributed (they're our revenue goals, too). But the partnership has to be there; we have to work together. And when we need information or feedback from you, it's not to bog you down, it's to find out whether the things we're doing are working or not. If a conference we sponsored sucks because the attendees were aerospace engineers and we told you they'd be veterinarians, we need to know!

Someone recently said to me "so what I'm hearing you say is that marketing isn't a solo activity; you can't do it without our involvement. We (sales) need to do some work, too." Had this not been a work environment, I may have hugged this person tightly and not let go. YES! That is exactly it. What other thing can you think of that operates in a vacuum successfully with no contributions from other sources?

I know I've mentioned this book before, but I cannot suggest it enough. I recommend sales leaders read Marketing to the Entitled Consumer and really take some of those messages to heart. It's no longer about us, the company with the cool product, service or experience. If we spend the first several paragraphs (or pages) talking about US, the potential customer or client has long-since put the brochure down, clicked onto something else or tuned out your presentation.

I was so inspired and so impressed by the examples in the book that demonstrated a respect for the marketing leaders who suggested their companies do things different and disrupt what everyone was else was doing.

But you're saying, "Stop inundating our customers with emails they don't want?" Ludicrous idea, right? Not when your data can tell you what they really want to know about and you only send them those things! Spend your money on data integrity and connecting systems to provide a clear picture of your customers. Don't let your valuable product, service or experience get jumbled with 200+ spam emails that fill up our inboxes every day like the ones above. That's really my mailbox, by the way, and not one of those emails is important to me.

All I'm suggesting is that we work together, instead of on parallel, never-intersecting paths. Marketing should compliment sales. When they work harmoniously, both can be successful instead of pointing the finger at who did what wrong.

Have you ever worked for an organization where sales and marketing worked really well together? How was that structured? I'd love to hear what you've seen work, regardless of industry or vertical.