Recycled Bullsh-IT

If you ask any marketeer the relationship between Sales and Marketing (S&M), they will invariably say that Sales is just the small task at the end of the overall Marketing process and therefore fairly insignificant. If you ask Sales the same question, you will get a vernacular explanation of how **** marketing ideas, materials, activities and leads are, so sales should have the marketing budget and do it themselves. BTW if you ask anyone else in the company, both these departments are considered a waste of money and to be full of unproductive bullsh-ITers. See also Recycled Bullsh-IT.

 Having deconstructed Sales in a previous blog, I thought I’d point my poison pen of perception at the mystique and merit of marketing. So, what do you really get from your young, hip, and annoyingly attractive marketing team with their expensive spending habits?

 Intelligence & Insight

Obviously, it would be good to know what your customers actually want, so be prepared to cough up for costly consultants and anal-ysts who will tell you what you knew anyway.  Or run focus groups who will agree with your questions as long as you pay them with food/drink/freebies.

Propositions & Portfolios

Once you know what’s wanted, put together the staggering list of features & benefits required to meet the perceived needs by segment and create some stunning PissPoorPoints to excite the senior execs, and p*ss off the development and operations functions who realise they have no chance of building and delivering it anytime soon. 

Branding & Brochures

Time to puff up the promises of the new product to create some bangin’ branding and cliché-filled copy, ready to splash across your digital channels. Sure, the animated website and sponsored TikTok influencers are fun but unless your prospect’s Procurement VP is a teenager, they’re a bit wasted. 

Advertising & Attraction

Most of you have (mis)heard the quote that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” What Marketing don’t tell you is with all the SEO, adword, and cookie data they now receive, they aren’t any wiser 100 years after the quote author, John Wannamaker, died. The only companies this is working well for are Google and Facebook.

 Lists & Leads

To sell large ticket and complex products & services, a sales exec will eventually have to talk to some senior people at the prospect and convince them to engage and align problem and solution. Ideally these meetings will be generated by direct (cold-calling, email spamming, etc) or indirect (punters contacting your company through online forms, coming to your events, etc) marketing. However, I can’t print what most new business sales folk say about the quality of these leads, as I’ve run out of asterisks. Most new business therefore tends to come from contacts the sales exec already has or creates themselves in their territory or account list by aggressively chasing via LinkedIn InMails.

I’m not saying that Marketing is totally useless, but, like all other business functions, Marketing needs to show some value out of the 50% it’s not wasting.

John “50 Shades” Moe