Marketing Exists to Make Sales Easier

Many moons ago when I was young product marketing manager, I heard a new VP of Marketing speak at a marketing all-hands meeting.  He spoke with a kiwi accent and his name was Chris Greendale.  What he said were six words that changed my career:

Marketing exists to make sales easier

While this has clearly been a theme in Kellblog posts over the years, I realized that I’ve actually never done a dedicated post on it, despite having written reductionist mission statement posts for both professional services (“maximize ARR without losing money”) and human resources (“help managers manage”).

Being a math type, I love deriving things from first principles and this seemed the perfect first principle from which to derive marketing.  First, you hire a team to build your product.  Then, you hire a team to sell it.  The only reason you need marketing is to help the second team do its job better.

At my next job, I remember bumping into Larry, our fresh from the used-car lot VP of Business Development, who in frustration (as he often was), one day came to work with a bunch of t-shirts that looked something like this

Enterprise software is a two-engine plane and those two engines are quota-carrying salesreps (QCRs) who sell the software and storypoint-burning developers (DEVs) who write it [1].

Everyone else is “the help” — including marketing, finance, sales supporting roles (e.g., SCs, SDRs), engineering-supporting roles (e.g., QA, PM, TPM), customer service, and yes, the CEO.  The faster you understand this, in my humble opinion, the better.

And, while we’re in realization mode, the other thing to internalize is that it costs about twice as much to sell an enterprise software product as it does to build it.  Per KeyBanc, typical S&M spend is 45% of revenue and R&D runs about half that.

But back to the mantra, make sales easier.  Why did I like it so much?

First, it put marketing in its proper place.  At the time, there was something of a power struggle between sales and marketing, and CPG/brand management types were trying to argue that product marketing mangers should be the generals and that sales were just the foot-soldiers.  Looking both around me and at the P&L that just seemed wrong.  Maybe it worked in consumer products [2] but this was enterprise software.  Sales had all the budget and all the power to go with it.  We should help them and, ego aside, there’s nothing wrong with being a helper.  In fact, if you define your mission statement as “help” and remember that “help is defined in the mind of the recipient,” you’ve already gone a long way to aligning your sales and marketing.

Second, there was nothing written in stone that limited the scope of that help. Narrow thinking might limit marketing to a servile role.  That’s not my intent.  Help could take many forms, and while the primary form of requested help has evolved over time, help can include both the tactical and the strategic:

• Giving sales qualified leads to work on.
• Building training and tools that helps sales sell more.
• Providing competitive information that helps win more deals.
• Creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) that helps sales focus on the most winnable deals.
• Building industry-specific messaging that helps sell in given verticals
• Working with PM [3] to build product that is inherently more salable [4].
• Corporate strategy development to put the company in the right markets with the right offerings.

When I say help, I don’t mean lowercase-h tactical help.  I mean help in all its forms, which can and should include the “tough love” form of help:  “I know you think you want that, but let me demonstrate that I’ve heard your request and now explain why I think it’s not a good idea.”

Being helpful doesn’t mean saying yes to everything.  I hearken back to Miracle on 34th Street whenever I’m drawn into this problem (quote adapted):

Kris Kringle:  No, but don’t you see, dear?  Some <salespeople> wish for things they couldn’t possibly use like real locomotives or B-29s.

If sales is asking you for a real locomotive or a B-29 you need to tell them.

For the rest of my marketing career, I took Greendale’s mantra and made it my own.  If sales were my customer and I were helping them, then:

• We’d run sales satisfaction surveys to see how happy sales was with marketing and where they wanted us to invest and improve [5].
• We’d make ourselves accountable.  One of the biggest stresses in the sales/marketing relationship was, to paraphrase an old joke, sales felt like the pig while marketing was the chicken.  We’d publish objectives, measure ourselves, and be honest about hits and misses.
• We’d bring data to the party.  We’d leverage syndicated and custom research to try and made data-driven as opposed to opinion-driven decisions.
• We’d stop back-seat marketers.  I’d remind anyone that got too uppity that “quotas are available” and they should go take one [6].
• We wouldn’t be the marketing police, scolding people for using out-of-date materials.  If sales were using a deck we’d decommissioned quarters ago, our first response wouldn’t be “stop!” but “why?”

We’d even do something that tested the limits of HR (particularly when I was in France).  I’d use the sales satisfaction survey to rank every customer-facing marketer on a matrix.

This gave me hard data on who sales knew in the department and what they thought of them.  If we’re going to make messaging for sales to present to customers, we’d better prepared to — and be good at — presenting it ourselves [7].

Overall, the mantra served me well, taking me from product marketing director to VP of product marketing to VP of corporate marketing to overall VP of marketing and a great run at Business Objects.  I’ve had plenty of people challenge me on it over the years — usually it’s because they understand it as purely tactical.  But it’s served me well and I encourage you to use it as your North Star in leading your marketing team.

After all, who doesn’t like help?

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Notes

[1] You’d be wise to add those two figures to your one-page key metrics.  Somehow it’s always easier to hire the supporting staff than the “engine” staff, so keep an eye on the raw numbers of QCRs and DEVs and, for more fun, track their density in their respective organizations (QCRs/sales and DEVs/eng).

[2] Shout out to my daughter Stephanie who works in brand management on a consumer product and who can now inform me directly of how things work in that world — and it is different.

[3] PM = product management.

[4] Either in the sense of better solves the problem or in the tactical sense of wipes out competitive differentiation.

[5] One of my favorite results was the sales and SCs often wanted exactly the same thing, but that sales wanted it more (i.e., roughly the same priority curve but sales would rank everything even more important than the SCs).

[6] Most didn’t, but a few did, and some did remarkably well.

[7] We were probably a $100M company around the time we started this, so I’m not suggesting it for a 2-PMM startup.  And yes, I’d put myself on the matrix as well.

(Cross-posted @ Kellblog)