Marketing People's Role

At our agency we frequently deal with marketing people (CMO's, VP's, Directors etc) related to our strategies due to the nature of our agencies services. Ultimately when the decision is made or during the negotiation we push to deal with the person in charge of business development or sales. Our agency exclusively deals with creating new relationships for our clients that measurably impact sales so we actually need to speak with and work with the people on the front-lines that sell the product or service.

This brings up the question of what marketing people's role actually is within any company. Since marketing people are not actually selling the product or service, it's crucially important to define roles and ensure that the roles don't bleed together.

Marketing's purpose is to create strategies that cultivate interest and create want for the product or service. From there, the business development team work to sell and close that interest or want with the goal of converting it into new revenue. While this seems very basic, it seems that the marketing people get involved in sales decisions and ideas related to sales that may or may not be applicable. This is generally a bad idea to involve your marketing people in sales related actions since they typically have little to no actual experience in sales.

Separate the two and keep your marketing people focused on effective campaigns and strategies that only produce interest and want for your product or service and then work with your business development team and VP Sales etc to actually take that "interest" or "want" to then sell and close it.

When the roles get confused, the outcome and results are poor in terms of effectiveness of the campaign. As long as you keep the roles focused, you will find that the marketing people produce better results to create interest and want and the sales team will then be able to focus on doing what they know to be workable to sell and close more business. Keep marketing and sales ideas, actions, decisions compartmentalized and focused then route the specific traffic to the correct areas.

For example:

(1) If you have a project for an email campaign, route this to your director of marketing to work out what should be promoted and how as well as what content will be in the email based on past results, survey's etc with the goal of cultivating interest and want for your sales team.

(2) Once you have the interest or want produced, immediately route that out of the hands of marketing and over to the VP Sales to direct to the sales team to handle with what they know best to do. The sales team can then focus on selling and closing the newly developed interest and want produced by marketing.

This sounds simplistic but the truth is that all too often I see marketing people still involved in step (2) as listed above which causes confusion and actually reduces the effectiveness of the campaign not to mention the chances of closing the sale.

Treat it like a relay race and know when to pass the baton as listed above and you'll find that the overall effectiveness of your campaigns will improve resulting in a better marketing to sales conversion rate.

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group