WCG SERVICES

- Is Marketing never sending over the “right “leads?

- Is Sales thinking more about your products or quota relief?

If Sales and marketing display more emotion towards each other than to your competition, you may need to seriously re-think your Go-to-Market approach. More often than not, the problem is not something vague like - “team chemistry” or “management challenge - don’t be seduced by easy solutions –- the best place to look, if you are ready to put this type of organizational foolishness behind you –is at your product:

If any of this sounds familiar, then it is no wonder Sales and Marketing are constantly at each other's throats. Too extreme? Given the total cost to your company when sales and marketing get it wrong, tearing each other to shreds rather than the market – this is too important to ignore.

Sales is an Alpha organization – they ALWAYS have an opinion who they are selling to, and the answer for every company, everywhere, is always the same. Sales sells to whoever is buying. Sounds obvious right? Wrong! If Sales is not selling to the buyer envisioned by product management – you are heading down a dangerous path. If you cannot correctly anticipate, in product management, who will be buying your product – reacting to whatever rock sales happens to find a buyer under will insure that your ability to build both revenue and margin is at risk.

Why? Because the nature of sales is to be reactionary. Sales wants to say yes, and it wants to modify products on the fly so that it can say yes – and the unpredictable nature of this type of deal pipeline increases internal costs across the board for example: operations, support, manufacturing distribution and future product investment are all directly impacted by who sales is selling to. Do you really want to bet your business on a reactionary organization?

Now before the swagger from Product Management gets too much to bear - lets consider their agenda. When it is working properly, Product Management MUST be the tireless and fearless advocate for the Product. They have the vision, the passion and the detailed know how to make that product hum. (Note: If they don’t have the passion then you have another type of problem all together: Bland Product Management: we will save that topic for another day) You want all of that product passion setting the direction for the business right??? Wrong!

Schmaltzy TV movies give us an entertaining, (even if poorly acted) view of what happens when passion is given free reign. Chaos, despair and tragedy – that is the most common result of unchecked passion. Want evidence? Remember all of those crazy head hunter calls you were getting between ’98 -’ 01? You know the ones, yet another internet product scheme that was going to build wealth beyond your dreams. Where have they all gone now? Sadly, a lot of them went bust chasing some product dream which had no market to make it real.

If your marketing organization is some toothless lead generation dept best suited for buying lame golf shirts, then you deserve what you get. Especially if you are crazy enough to have it report to Sales. Real Marketing organizations define markets before one drop of promotion and advertising budget is spent. The best define markets starting with the wishful passions of Product Management, grounding them firmly into the reality of needing to find a buyer, but not just any buyer as Sales is sometimes temped to mistakenly insist upon.

What is needed is a healthy balance –- and tension –- between the three – Sales, Product Management and Marketing, each covering the other’s back and being managed to do exactly the specialty they were hired to do (rather than take easy shots at their colleagues when they are exposed).

Save the Ultimate Fighting for cable TV and instead take your fight to the competition.