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 is the story about a shoe manufacturer who wonders whether a market exists for shoes on a remote island. He first sends an order taker to the island to investigate the market opportunities. The order taker visits the island and reports back.  “The people here don’t wear shoes. There is no market”. 

Unsatisfied with the answer the shoemaker then sends a sales person. The sales person returns and reports.  “People do not wear shoes. There is a tremendous market.” 

Now completely confused the shoemaker sends the marketing person. The marketing person too visits the remote island, returns back and reports out.

“The people here don’t wear shoes. However they have bad feet. I have shown the chief on the island how shoes would help avoid these foot problems. He’s very enthusiastic. He estimates that 70% of his people will buy the shoes at the price of $10 a pair. We probably can sell 5,000 pairs of shoes in the first year, because there’s currently very little competition. Our cost of bringing the shoes to the island and setting up distribution would amount to $6 a pair. We will clear $ 20,000 in the first year, which, given our investment, will give us a rate of return on our investment of 20%, which exceeds our normal ROI of 15%. This is not to mention the high value of our future earnings by entering this market. I recommend that we go ahead.”

A while ago a created the attached customer value model. This model looks at all the influencers that a typical customer is faced with making a purchase decision. The model is probably generic enough to work for any B-2-B settings, but each industry / company has to figure out the relative importance and weight of each attribute presented.   Decision Making model