Rate Your Marketing Team!

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  terrya6905/15/08 Report as spam
  1

  Rate your marketing team.

  I sold for 25 years b4 taking over marketing. Low cost and effective don't
  necessarily go together. Today's best leads are generated via personalized
  promotions such as PURL's, email and direct mail. They aren't inexpensive but
  they do get results at a much higher rate than generic promotions. So, don't go
  cheap. Do less of a better marketing method to get better results at about the
  same cost.

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine05/15/08 Report as spam
  2

  Good point.

  I should have said something like "cost-effective" rather than "low cost." Although I do note that some of the most effective marketing nowadays is pretty low cost. Email marketing is practically free, for example.

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  Bob Wileman05/15/08 Report as spam
  3

  Marketing

  The comment is trivial and has no business value
  A pity I had to waste my time reading it looking for insights.

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  terrya6905/15/08 Report as spam
  4

  Trivial is as trivial does.

  I'm sure you must be at the top of the totem pole Mr. Personality.

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine05/15/08 Report as spam
  5

  Fair "Nuff. Some Insights:

  Insight #1: Marketing groups that have sales experience, can generate good leads, good sales materials, and understand what customers want can help a company make more sales, more quickly.
  
  Insight #2: Marketing groups that lack sales experience, can't generate good leads, create useless sales materials, and bloviate about absurd product features impede sales and waste money.
  
  Insight #3: Anybody who gets angry when these insights are pointed out probably belongs to one of the two marketing groups described above. Guess which one.

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  boydroge05/15/08 Report as spam
  6

  RE: Rate Your Marketing Team!

  C'mon Geoffery - where's the solutions? Anybody can point out the sales & marketing issues in this world, as almost every company has them...what about some solutions. Real sales experience for every single marketing person is one (& vis-a-versa), but why spend your life driving the devide?

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine05/15/08 Report as spam
  7

  Point taken.

  The problem is that until marketing folk figure out that they're suffering from delusions of grandeur (e.g. "we're 'driving' sales") there's not much that can be done other than point out that the emperor, while perhaps not entirely naked, is only wearing a top hat and a thong.

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  TrenchWriter05/16/08 Report as spam
  8

  Not a fair assessment

  Guys - you are all assuming marketing is operating in a vacuum here. What if a marketing person is all of the things she's supposed to be, but has little or no budget, uninterested or non-communicative teams, or unrealistic expectations from constituents who don't understand how marketing should work (i.e., Marketing doesn't make sales, it drives sales - don't expect conversion from a business web site to result in anything more than an inquiry. Duh.) Be real about the circumstances before trying to grade us all under one assumption.

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  Jeff Ernst, VP of Marketing at Kadient05/18/08 Report as spam
  9

  RE: Rate Your Marketing Team!

  Sales and marketing people have different DNA, so you can't expect every marketer to have extensive sales experience. The real issue is that marketing focuses its attention at the top of the sales funnel, producing campaigns and materials at the 30,000 foot level that don't help sales people have better conversations with buyers, which makes marketing irrelevant to the sales process. Sales reps waste valuable time making up their own stuff, and the quality and consistency of the messages suffer.
  
  As a marketer, it surprises most of my peers when I say that the most effective marketing messages are discovered and refined in the field, through the experiences the reps have with buyers. If marketing is going to be relevent to sales, the two groups need to work together to understand the buyer, buying process, and the conversations reps need to have to create value at each stage.
  
  Marketing needs to get out into the field and find out what messages are working for the reps for every critical conversation that needs to happen to sell your product or service. Then get those messages into materials and tools that can be delivered to all reps in the context of the opportunities they are working. It sounds so obvious, but so few companies operate this way.