Are we on the planet just to feed the sales team leads?
27th April 2006 by Merry Elrick
BMA (Business Marketing Association) sends out some great educational e-mail, but the one I just received made my stomach hurt. The inference was that we exist to supply the sales team with leads, and branding programs are just fluff. Here’s the quote:
The plain fact is that marketing teams who say they have a “metrics” problem really mean to say their marketing program isn’t generating sales leads. In the real world, this comes from running fluffy, branding-oriented marketing programs that don’t make a compelling case for the product to its prospect, and running these programs too long eventually causes the company’s sales team to complain that marketing programs aren’t generating sales leads for them.
Yes, lead generation is critical. But I’d like to see the sales team sell when their prospects have no clue about their company, their offering, their brand. And while it’s very difficult to demonstrate ROI on brand-building communications, there are metrics that apply. We need both lead-generation and brand-building communications in a healthy marketing mix.
But gads, is this quote heresy or what?
April 30th, 2006 at 4:16 am
Merry,
A couple of comments to your excellent post.
- “selling” and “marketing” are not synonomous but what passes for marketing is often selling. I’ve always been surprised to meet salespeople who’d prefer any businesscard title OTHER than “sales:” they prefer “business development,” “New Business” and even “marketing.” I don’t know the BMA but maybe the M is BMA is a reference to sales.
- the best distinction I know between “selling” and “marketing” is that while they both lead to the same objective (sales), “marketing” ought to be defined as “a process by which sales are made profitably.” The reference to “profitability” is one related to “efficiency” and good marketing makes the sales process more efficient. Marketing with a “capital M” denotes marketing’s involvement in pricing, communication, distribution all of which, when done right, makes the sales process more efficient. As you say, it’s harder to sell a product that no one knows and which is priced too high than one that everyone knows and to which everyone attaches value for price. Marketing facillitates sales.
- Some people view sales as a linear process…that the sales process always begins at one place and ends in a sale…that the process begins with outputs designed to create awareness and then understanding, preference, and purchase (or something like that). If that is the view of the BMA, then you’d have to agree that all marketing and communication help to build awareness which ultimately ends in a sale. It’s a simple view but the BMA isn’t the only organization that holds it to be true.
- Communication is often used as a marketing tool but some forms of communication are not intended to drive a sale per se even if they are designed to elicit a behavior. Political communication, employee communication, public safety communication do not end with a transaction.
Does marketing always end in a sale? It would be interesting to hear how it works in other organizations.
Mark
May 3rd, 2006 at 8:40 am
Yes, Mark, it makes me crazy that “marketing” and “selling” are so often used interchangeably.
And to your comment about sales as a linear process…I believe you are referring to the Hierarchy of Effects, which holds that (in a very brief nutshell) advertising and promotion build awareness through to sales in a chain of events:
awareness > interest > desire > conviction > purchase
This hypothesis was published in the Journal of Marketing in 1961, and we have been using this model ever since. It’s time for a change, no? This is why we have been telling people in the C-suite for forty years that awareness is so important. And, of course, it is, but there is many a slip between awareness and purchase, or even conviction and purchase.
I believe that for all these years, the HoE model has legitimized poor objective setting, leading us down the primrose path to “awareness.” We can, and must, do better.
As a “small world” aside, when I was researching the HoE a few years ago, I found out that the 1961 article was written by Bob Lavidge and Gary Steiner, both of whom worked for my father in 1961. Bob, in fact, was my father’s partner in a market research firm he founded in the early 1950s, Elrick and Lavidge. Crazy, huh?