Conventional thinking in the “sales and marketing” world is that there’s sales and then there’s marketing. And while they are not completely irrelevant to each other, they are nevertheless distinct disciplines and they operate best when neither one tries to drift into the realm of the other.
We mention this only for the purpose of letting you know that we think this is nonsense. Marketing must support sales. Directly.
Now we will admit we did not always see it this way. In fact, in the early years of the company, we were actually quite purist about the distinction between public relations and advertising. We were on Team PR in those days, and we didn’t want those mangy advertising types getting involved and trying to taint the purity of our efforts.
Without getting too much into why we felt that way at the time (maybe a certain former boss who was constantly trying to manipulate PR copy for all the wrong reasons?), the fact of the matter is experience has told us otherwise.
We have sat in too many client meetings in which we are asked about the metrics by which to measure the ROI of our work, and we got tired of doing the dance and asserting that the value is intangible but nonetheless critical.
No. You have to be able to measure it by showing its impact on sales. Otherwise you have no case to make for why someone should be paying you.
The marketing-as-separate-from-sales argument generally goes like this: Marketing is about your company’s brand awareness and positioning. If marketing does these things well, your positioning will make it easier for the sales team to generate leads and close deals. But they’re still separate disciplines.
This can sound persuasive when someone says it at a conference or in a webinar, or some sort of scholarly journal for the trade association. But it makes no sense.
The content we write is designed to make the case for our clients, to persuade the most critical audiences of their value and of the positive impact they can make. That type of information can and should be in the hands of the sales team, and it only makes sense that we create adaptations of it for the sales team to deploy.
Maybe the 800-word blog post we put on the web site can be broken down to a 150-word email the sales team can send to prospects. Maybe the feature article in the Wall Street Journal (might as well think big, right?) can be repackaged so the sales team can show prospects how strong the company’s reach and reputation are.
It only makes sense that the marketing content team is the one to make all this happen. To do all the branding and positioning work, and then insist we shouldn’t be partnering with the sales team to help them make the case directly to prospects is so dumb, it could only have been thought of by industry purists who have overthought themselves into marginalized irrelevance.
Kind of like we used to be. Before we got old and wised up.