Why Managing different departments early in your career yields a higher ROI for you: the case of Marketing, Sales and Customer Experience

"It is better that you will keep managing only this type of department. Otherwise, people will not hire in the future"; "I see you managed more Sales than Customer Experience departments, why should we hire you?"; "I see you did not work directly in a Marketing department, so even if you have 9 years at Google (building digital strategy and enhancing digital transformation to clients) we are not sure you are the right person for managing a Marketing department"

These are only few examples of comments I received throughout my career, and you will receive the same comments too. People will be anchored to their own beliefs, and surely they will question how come you were successful in different contexts. Why so?

• They believe that Sales, Customer Experience, and Marketing are indeed related, but also think that the three of them are profoundly different in terms of personality types, skills needed, goals. And this is true...up to a certain point!
• They believe an excellent manager in the department X cannot replicate the same impact in the department Y or Z
• They believe different departments require to some extent different manager personality types

"If you did this, you can't do that." But is it true?

Sales, Customer Experience, and Marketing in high-performance companies share a lot of similarities. So what do they have in common? Well if a company is really functioning toward LISTENING to their customers:

• They all put the customer at the center: it is about them and their need first.
• They all try to collect customer feedback along the way and put a proper action plan around it so teams can become more efficient and productive too!
• They are all "selling", where "selling" is defined as opening, growing, and nurturing a relationship based on the tangible AND emotional needs of your customers.
• Although there are different personality types involved, when it comes to managing people a lot of skills and tools are actually transferable.
• Especially in more innovative organizations, they all have defined targets to achieve (e.g. for Sales is Revenue; for Customer Experience Department is CSAT, TAT, NPS; for Marketing is maximizing ROI and CLV). In more traditional departments targets were more easily associated with the sales department.
• The targets are all linkable to the person's performance. Especially with digital age, it became easier for the Marketing and Customer Experience department to understand how much each person was contributing to the department.
• They naturally work together. How can you really sales, if you don't have the constant support of your marketing department? They naturally work together in a successful organization. At the same time, how can sales and marketing sell effectively if they don't have that gold mine of information coming from the Customer Experience team?

It is true that a good chunk of the CEO population comes from Sales or Consulting, but a significant part had instead different experiences in different departments. Rightfully so: because you are getting different angles of the business!

So how managing different departments will benefit you? Some examples.

Then if all of this is true, then you will have a natural advantage in all the three contexts:

• As Head of Sales: you will be able to understand that targets are only the starting point, and that you will have naturally to bond with marketing to enhance your strategy at scale....which in turn will make sure that MORE people are constantly on target. Because you worked in marketing before you will speak the same language with your counterpart, and naturally this will facilitate a healthy process where marketing efforts generate spontaneously more leads for Sales. At the same time you will make sure to loop in constantly with the Customer Experience managers, so to gauge what the customer is really thinking of you in several markets and context.
• As Head of Customer Experience: you will understand that managing incoming support volumes and optimize costs is important, but this can be achieved better by analyzing proactively the feedback flow from your customer. This in turn can be proactively handled to Marketing department in the context of how to optimize their performance campaign. Also, because you worked in Sales, you will understand that is tremendously important for Sales department to keep acquired customers happy: you will naturally loop in with them to share world-class and forefront insights on their customer.
• As Head of Marketing: You will have a clear understanding of the sales and Customer Experience mechanics, so you will have more data points to reach a marketing strategy that yields a higher ROI and CLV.

Still in doubt? Happy to hear your thoughts :)