Marketers need to learn that when sales and marketing fight, sales wins. Even when they’re wrong.
Here’s a quiz for distribution executives:
Q: How do you pronounce the title, “VP Sales and Marketing”?
A: “VP Sales” (The “marketing” is silent)
With some notable exceptions, most VPs of Sales & Marketing come from sales and inherit marketing thanks to CEOs who see the two departments as natural chums. In reality, VPs managing both usually know a lot about sales, not much about marketing, and bringing the two departments together creates an amazing albeit unstable solution – much like when you nitrate glycerol.
Boom.
But, if you’re going to have one leader for both functions, it makes sense to choose the candidate from sales: Sales is an essential function for most distributors while a marketing function is optional.
To be clear:
A. A great marketing department can help a distributor drive much better sales, profits and long-term growth.
B. The absence of a good marketing department slows down growth and profitability.
C. A bad marketing department not only hurts business results but also annoys everyone along the way.
Generally speaking, the distribution of distribution marketing departments is about a third from each of A, B and C. I thus bow to the marketing heroes who make essential contributions; mourn for those distributors lacking this exciting catalyst for growth; and flip the bird to the marketers who make the discipline look bad through their egregious behaviors. Pro tip: Acting like the Department of Brand Guidelines Enforcement is no way to win the hearts and minds of your coworkers.
Read more: Distributors: You’re Doing Marketing Wrong — and It’s Going to Cost You
Why is It Marketing’s Fault When Sales and Marketing Fight?
Three common reasons:
A. Sales is closer to the customer and has a much better handle on what products, services and messages are relevant in the market.
B. Marketers obsess over dumb things at the expense of helping to grow sales. For example, nobody has yet developed a model for how Facebook “Likes” equate to sales growth. Also: No one cares about fonts, color correction, pagination or pixilation but you. Sorry.
But the real answer is:
C. It doesn’t matter. Sales wins all these arguments anyway, so if there’s going to be peace between the two functions, marketing has to learn to win over sales. Sales doesn’t have to win over marketing.
Wait: Why does Sales win arguments? Because in most distribution firms, the revenue line is structured around salespeople. If you’re a $100 million company, at least $80 million of your sales (and probably closer to $90 million) can be tracked to a specific salesperson. CEOs use that information to assign responsibility and accountability. They can take specific actions in response to good and bad outcomes (promote or fire the responsible parties), and it gives them a sense of control over the company’s revenue line.
There’s no corollary for marketers in many companies. Can you identify exactly which revenues and profits marketing is responsible for, or do you have some vague, overall impact on results supported by soft numbers, speculation and dubious claims of how your tagline made all the difference? Salespeople have specific sales goals, clear accountability and they’re with customers every day. Marketing has none of this.
If you’re a marketing leader, when’s the last time the CEO called you to say, “Angus, things could be tight this quarter. Make sure you drive the troops hard to close the sales gap.”
Pulling Marketing Out of the Rabbit Hole
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
I don’t believe marketers are mad (well, not all of them), but I’ve met some who seem to have wound up in marketing by accident. They’re not sure what they’re supposed to do, so they lash about for something to grab onto and call their own. That’s why so many marketers spend their time on social media marketing, branding and complaining about their budgets.
If you’re in distributor marketing, how about you:
- Ride along with sales reps and figure out how to help them sell more.
- Take responsibility for the customer lifecycle: new customer count, wallet share, retention, win back, etc.
- Get a team from sales, marketing, operations and purchasing (e.g., SMOP) together every month to plan your promotions.
- Set up a ticketing system where field salespeople can ask for marketing support and you provide it.
- Conduct high-quality research so you can understand customer needs.
- Measure the company’s service performance: on-time deliveries, percent of orders that ship complete, will call ready rate, telephone service metrics, etc.
- Launch a Net Promoter Score (NPS) initiative to measure customer satisfaction.
- Shop your competitors and report back on your experience.
- Create a “services” tab on your website with compelling descriptions of your company’s value-added services.
- Work on the company’s value proposition so it goes beyond some form of “what you want, when you want it, where you want it.” We researched this phrase and found the first use in The Timberman magazine from 1919. It’s tired; give it a rest.
- Call your top 20 suppliers to ask about their marketing objectives. See if you can align your plans with their needs. If you can, they’ll fund most of your initiatives. (Read more: Stop Leaving Supplier Marketing Co-Op Funds on the Table.)
- Follow the Golden Rule of Distributor Marketing: The more often you put relevant offers in front of targeted customers, the more frequently they’ll buy.
I could give you more examples, but if you do this stuff, you’ll be way ahead of your competitors. More importantly, marketers who enthusiastically throw themselves into initiatives like these discover:
- Salespeople like them and support the marketing department because it’s contributing to their ability to sell more.
- The CFO looks more benevolently upon their budget requests because the marketers are obviously contributing to the financial success of the firm and are raising much of their own money from supplier co-op.
- Marketing leaders earn an equal place at the table and can effectively interact with sales leaders because both departments have become essential.
Perhaps you think the title of this article is unfair, and the war between marketing and sales isn’t really anyone’s fault. But it doesn’t matter: Marketing has to take the initiative to end the war and that means becoming as essential, useful and relevant as the sales department. If you’re in distributor marketing, absolutely no one can do that for you.
So, accept responsibility for the making peace even if you didn’t start the war. It’s the right thing to do for the company, for the marketing department and for your career.
As always, we welcome your feedback. Please feel free to comment below or email me at: iheller@distributionstrategy.com.
As someone who has been working as a one person marketing department for the past 10 years, I respectfully disagree with a lot of this article.
I’m not sure who your target audience is for this article as most of the distributors I am aware of also have one person marketing departments – usually marketing is not even their sole responsibility and have never heard of a “VP of Sales & Marketing.” So I’m guessing it’s the “big guys” you’re talking to, which let’s be honest don’t need marketing help because they have money and resources to create a great marketing department.
Wherein lies the real problem here. Distributors don’t want to invest time, resources and funding into their marketing departments. It’s a flaw in a 100+ year old business model that is only starting being addressed (by again the “big guys”). Companies, no matter the industry, who support and staff their marketing departments with ample funding and resources 9/10 times will be successful. If you aren’t doing that then you can’t look any further into the problem. Until marketing is given the tools they need to succeed by management to show what they can do, they’ll never know the full extent of what their company can do. You get out what you put in.
Marketers are not miracle workers. Most of us are spread thin and a ride along with a salesperson isn’t going to do anything that a salesperson who behaves as an adult can’t convey over a phone call or email. Why is it my job (a salaried position) to go out of my way to not only find out what can help you do your job (a commission based position) better but also create the solution for you. You make more money when you have more sales, the motivation to speak up when need you something is there. We’re all adults, pick up the phone.
Trust me, the last thing any distributor marketer needed was an article bashing them. Maybe a better article would have been discussing the importance of investing in your marketing department or discussing strategic ideas for marketing departments with limited resources (aka 90% of the industry). You need better insight into who is reading these articles because it’s not the “big guys”, it’s the little guys who are searching for help to do their job better not be scolded because they don’t do enough… it will never be enough.
I also can say, marketing will never have an equal place at the table as sales in this industry, at least until management starts making some serious changes.
Hi John,
Thanks for your respectful response; I appreciate it, especially on such an emotional issue. You have my respect even though I disagree with some of your positions.
First, you’re mistaken if you believe that large distributors “don’t need marketing help because they have money and resources to create a great marketing department.” Many large distributors have small marketing groups with tiny budgets. As I wrote in the blog, about 1/3rd of distributors with whom I meet have great marketing functions. The rest do not.
Second, you will never have credibility with sales or with senior executives if you don’t make sales calls. Accepting calls from reps is not a substitute for that.
Third, you talk with resentment about your salaried position vs. a sales rep’s commissioned position. From the sales rep’s point of view, he or she lives with a daily scoreboard of their performance that everyone can see. If the score is bad, they get fired. Many sales reps resent that salaried corporate types don’t face that kind of risk. So, what you view as a big plus for sales reps they view as a very different level of accountability.
Fourth, you ask, “Why is it my job (a salaried position) to go out of my way to not only find out what can help you do your job (a commission-based position) better but also create the solution for you?” The answer is because when you’re in distributor marketing, sales reps are your internal customers. So it literally is your job to create solutions for them that help them close more sales. You wouldn’t ask this rhetorical question of an external customer, why ask it of an internal customer?
John, when you’re in distributor marketing, you can’t wait for someone to give you a bigger budget. You have to earn it by generating co-op and providing hard data that the money you receive is put to good use.
Remember that every marketing expenditure is inherently speculative: CEOs don’t know if they will get good return if you spend the money and this is made worse by marketing’s inability to provide any measurements one way or the other. So, it looks like a black hole vs. the ever-present choice of not spending the money and instead taking it to the bottom line. They can measure that choice definitively.
Distribution marketers need to be visionary, inspirational and approach their jobs with a servant-leader mindset. And they also need to earn their budget dollars whether those are coming from suppliers or management.
Thanks again for your note and feel free to send me an email if you’d like to schedule a call. I won’t try to sell you a thing, but I will try to help you succeed.
All the best,
Ian
A good marketer makes a salesperson’s life easier. Good sense suggests that he or she talk to reps on a regular basis to make certain he knows what is happening locally. Reps may suggest package deals and he should pay attention. Best info will come from sales statistics, new products and possibly national sales info. If he is bound by traditional margins, he should have the authority to change them to make a good deal for all parties. Simple? All good ideas are simple, easy to understand.
I have seen ridiculous fights between sales and marketing which solved no problems, just created them. Both sides must abandon their fiefdoms to make the COMPANY and its customers profitable.
Thank you for this response. I was too frustrated by this article to even begin writing a counter. UGH!
Thank you for this response, John Popeck. I was too frustrated by this article to even begin writing a counter. UGH!