Traditional Sales and Marketing? They're History
When you walk into a church for a wedding, you're immediately asked on which side you belong. And though you sit down just a few feet away from those on the "other side," the gulf couldn't be wider because throughout the rest of the event - not to mention the rest of the marriage - the vast majority on both sides seem programmed to keep to their own. Like two disparate families who have been forced together by factors outside of their control, sales and marketing - only a few years ago tangentially related at best - are now expected to cooperate at a level like never before. What has typically resulted is a misguided attempt by many organizations to artificially slam the two functions together while keeping much of their existing individual structures intact. If you want to foster relationships that yield significant productivity, we believe you need to rearrange the seating from the start.
ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION
The trouble with sales and marketing working together as they are currently constructed is largely a result of the sea change that has occurred within marketing over the past several years. While it is certainly true that sales has become more specialized, marketing has trumped it by morphing into no less than seven different sub-functions. These sub-functions include executive/strategy, branding/advertising, corporate communications, market intelligence, product marketing, field marketing and channel marketing. Of these seven sub-functions, three - field marketing, product marketing and channel marketing - have emerged as dominant in terms of focus, spending and personnel allocation. The fact that these three together now command more than 70 percent of b-to-b marketing dollars and headcount is a far cry from even five or six years ago, when "traditional" subfunctions including advertising and public relations were often dominant. It is no understatement to say that since the boom times of the late 1990s, the focus of b-to-b marketing has turned 180 degrees. We refer to this group of now dominant sub-functions as "hybrids," meaning that they require a significant amount of input from both marketing and sales to ensure they will be effective and efficient. Though these hybrids mark the critical points where sales and marketing truly cross and are the core of b-to-b marketing (and sales) for today and beyond, they often lack efficacy for reasons that have organization at their core.
A PAIR BECOMES A TRIO
It certainly can be argued that most b-to-b organizations have realized the critical role that the hybrid sub-functions will play in their future; one needs look no further than the budget and personnel data to verify this fact. What they haven't done is to elevate these sub-functions into true prominence organizationally, a misstep that will continue to result in increasing frustration between sales and marketing, wasted dollars and personnel, and key groups that are performing at a suboptimal level. To achieve the goal of predictable, accelerating revenues in today's marketplace, a b-to-b organization must "create" three things: reputation, demand and revenue. "Sales" and "marketing" are no longer key goals in and of themselves, but rather pieces of an overall puzzle that achieves these three goals. It is under the auspices of these goals that SiriusDecisions has created one alternative vision for the future of the b-to-b organization with the following specifics:
Reputation. Despite the fact that its dominance on b-to-b spend and personnel allocation has significantly eased, there is still a significant need for every organization to cultivate a strong image within its marketplace. This first area houses the traditional marketing sub-functions of branding/advertising and corporate communications (public relations, public affairs, analyst relations, internal communications), and uses these subfunctions to "prime the pump" in terms of demand creation. This includes increasing overall positive attitude toward an organization's products/services, and increasing the likelihood that those products/services are in a buyer's considered set from the start of his/her buying process.
Demand creation. This is the new home for our hybrid sub-functions, which are now placed on the same playing field as traditional marketing and sales, and organized into a macro function which will cultivate their natural synergies. The demand creation area must be headed by a leader that has hybrid experience, as he or she will truly be serving as the "human bridge" between reputation and revenue, or traditional marketing and traditional sales. We believe market intelligence is best suited moving under product marketing (which itself finally breaks free from product management); doing so will provide this typically underfunded and underutilized sub- function a single customer that can elevate its organizational impact. Finally, field marketing morphs into an organization with three key goals: new customer acquisition, channel marketing/lead development and loyalty marketing.
Revenue. The third area houses what historically has been called "sales," with the understanding that b-to-b organizations now use a number of channels to sell. The key differences here are the very tight ties between the sub-functions within sales - inside, field and channel - and the corresponding sub-functions in the demand creation area that feed them. As we have depicted, each of these three new functions must have a leader with relevant, specific experience, as well as its own set of metrics that can be tracked by the chief operating officer we suggest all three report to. If no other changes are made, the function of demand creation must be added, and added under either the sales or marketing banner depending on current competencies.
Today's changing marketplace and its new requirements have rendered the old, two-pronged sales and marketing approach much less effective, and pasting up and coming sub-functions into it is a recipe for effects that range from significant frustration to complete disaster. It is time that executives within b-to-b organizations look forward to what sales and marketing have truly evolved into, rather than back at what they were.
