Mini-Hiatus
Due to a family illness, I’m taking a few days off from posting on Opinionated.
If all goes well, I’ll be back next week.
What’s Marketing’s Job? Maureen’s take.
The other day, I posted on my friend Sean’s simple, straightforward list of marketing’s responsibilities. It all comes down to four little words for what we need to do for customers: Identify. Attract. Get. Keep.
My list is even shorter - I put everything into one or two buckets, viewing our job as:
- Making products easier to buy
- Making products easier to sell
We make our products easier to buy when we do our best to see that they meet a market need and provide true benefits; that they are sensibly priced; that they are clearly understood. We make our products easier to buy when we provide our prospects with the input they need to make their decision - and make it in our direction - at every stage of the sales process, and we do this for everyone involved in that process. We also make sure that people know where to find us, how to contact us, how to actually buy from us. (True story: I worked for years for a small software company that at one point in our life sold to vertical markets. The president of the company got a few phone calls from a guy at an insurance company - insurance was one of our prime verticals - and kept ignoring them, thinking that the guy was trying to sell him insurance. Wrong! The guy just wanted to buy our product - and we weren’t helping him along at all, at all.)
We make our products easier to sell when we do our best to make sure that there’s awareness about our products and our company in the market; that the products are well targeted - and our sales folks know who those targets are, and what to say when they reach them; that the leads we produce are reasonably well-qualified ones.
I’ve worked on a few products that, I came to realize after the fact, were neither easy to buy nor easy to sell.
These products were typically the product of pure engineering, sometimes cobbled together from disparate chunks of software that had been purpose built for something else but which could (at least logically) be assembled for another purpose. Once the first wobbly product was thrown over the transom for marketing to launch, the rest of the product’s nasty, brutish, and always too long life cycle was spent trying to soup it up or retrofit it so that more than a handful of people in the market actually wanted it. For whatever reason, in my experience, these sorts of products are always high price. I’m no big proponent of Bob’s Discount Anything, but when your product’s double the cost of the nearest competitor without providing anywhere near double the value, you’ve got yourself a product that is just too darned hard to buy. So you spend all your time trying to explain-in value that just isn’t there.
The same sorts of thinking goes for making products easier to sell. If there’s no awareness of your company and your products, you’re putting up another hurdle for sales to have to overcome. Fortunately, just having a website goes part of the way to help out here - as long as you make sure that someone searching for your type of product finds you. But there’s more to awareness building than a well-optimized site. Press. Analysts. Social media. You may not want - or need - to be where everyone knows your name. But it’s sure easier to sell if the people you do want to attract have at least a vague clue about who you are and what you’ve got. As for targeting, if you don’t tell sales where their best chances are, they’ll make something up. Sometimes what they make up will work well - at least for a while - but mostly it won’t. If you haven’t targeted your products well, your sales folks will be shooting in the dark - and, believe me, they’re pretty bad shots.
Anyway, this is my take on marketing - and it’s one that’s held up pretty well over the years.
