Sales and Marketing Roles in Business Development

Featured Person: Chad Root, Spearhead Sales and Marketing, President/Founder

Discovering Marketing Roles

CR: This is Chad with Spearhead Sales and Marketing and thank you for joining us again for our leverage sales and marketing video series. We’re just exploring the interplay between sales and marketing and who does what. Basic fundamentals say to collaborate and understand that sales and marketers need to do their own parts. What we’ll try to do is break this down more specifically and give people a way to figure out those roles and work well together.

Thinking about your marketplace and your organization, who is the best person/group to go to, to get the voice of the customer?

Utilizing Marketing Roles Data

In big marketing such as Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, or tv spots, there is a ton of data available to help you better understand your target market. All this information is available today even for small companies and markets using Facebook. Being able to break down demographics, behaviors, age groups, and preferences on your own is unprecedented. We’ve never been able to have this information at our fingertips and now we do. Now salespeople can get on Facebook and run ads themselves as well as marketers. Now we just need to pull back for a second and really figure out what we’re trying to accomplish.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Henry Ford. He said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” Now, how true is that? As salespeople, we’re constantly being told I want a lower price, these specific features, or I wish your customer service would do this. It’s difficult sometimes to not get stuck in the mud with all these requests.

Understanding Marketing Roles Positioning

So I’d encourage you to meet with your executive team and talk about your company and your positioning and what it is that you can do better than everyone else. So if your positioning is that you’re the biggest in your market, focus on being the biggest. If you’re the best, the highest quality, then continue to keep doing those things that keep you in that position. The requests from customers that reduce your quality in order to speed up lead time or minimize costs, may not get the priority because you’ve already established your position. There’s a great book called Marketing Malpractice, The Cause and the Cure and with that, I’m going to share a few main points from it depicting what it is clients really want.

Is your target client in a position where they’re forced to meet commitments regularly? If so, you may want to zero in on that for your marketing communications, sales presentations, and questions that you ask. Find out what types of commitments they have and how they plan to deliver.

In other cases, there is just an innate desire to feel important about their work. They want to feel like they are contributing to a larger cause. If that’s the case, again your marketing communications and sales discovery should reflect that.

I won’t go through all of these but this gives you a sense of where to start. Helping others, preventing mistakes/problems, managing key variables, communication, managing time, and having fun.

Notes:

• Our goal is to help determine the roles of sales and marketing in today’s integrated and digital world
• Who is the best group in your company to provide the “voice of the customer”?
• Read between the lines and solve the “mystery” with something you can do better than anyone else (Faster horses=Cars)

Conclusion:

That’s all for now, we just wanted to present this tool. Again the book is Marketing Malpractice, The Cause, and the Cure and our featured quote is from Henry Ford stating, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” Until next time, thanks! You can contact us at info@spearheadsalesmarketing.com.