thefunnel

What does field marketing do and how can field marketing create value? This is an interesting question, particularly in engineering focused companies, where there’s sometimes a lack of marketing understanding, and marketing at its best is often marginalized to entry level marcoms, like production of specification sheets, etc. So how can a marketing organization in these situations justify its existence, and achieve a higher level recognition? One way to do this is to partner with sales, because even the most engineering minded organizations needs sales to survive. This might feel like marketing is taking a sub-servant role, and in many organizations, unfortunately this is the case, but played our right this could be only a start. One way to think about the marketing value is to use the sales model concept from solution selling. In solution selling, the sales process (focus, value, relationship, intent, etc.) is generally thought as being in one of four phases or levels. Level one selling is where the relationship with the customer is casual, the focus of the efforts is the product, and the only intent is to get the customer to consider buying.  Level four selling, on the other hand, is a place where the sales person is an insider, in a symbiotic relationship with the customer and through a thorough understanding of the customers’ business can provide strategic advice, while making a sale. Similarly, marketing on level one is normally limited to lead generation, providing presentation material and general assistance, while a level four marketing is a partnership, enabling, equipping and providing sales with strategic leadership. Using a model like this can benefit marketing in many ways, but most importantly by aligning the marketing efforts to whichever level the selling is done, “sales support” can be optimized for maximum fit, which helps build the relationship with sales providing a good platform for success. In addition in knowing the maturity level of sales, marketing can help push the organization to the next level of sophistication and value, and ultimately be able to use more of its brainpower and earn the recognition it deserves.

This one is a continuation to a couple my earlier posts in relation to the different functions of marketing. On it’s simplest level some organizations have a hard time figuring out where to draw the line between outbound and inbound marketing, in addition to understanding how tasks should be split up between “creating value”, “providing value” and “communicating value”. Not intentionally, but in large organizations, with a lot of change, if roles and responsibilities aren’t clear it will create a problem. But things gets more complex than this, because marketing also interacts with both sales and business development and there’s the grey zone between marketing – sales, sales – business development, and business development – marketing, as illustrated. I think the obvious areas that warrants some more conversations are: The role of marketing in customer retention activities versus sales as a “farmer” function. The role of sales as “hunters” versus a business development function. The role of a business development function as a “value provider” or “value communicator” versus inbound marketing or marketing communications. The sweet spot is in the middle where you have a good balance between marketing, sales and business development.