Put Marketing in Its Lane

Webinar Transcript

   n behalf of the GSM team thank you for spending a few minutes with us this afternoon this is part of our series about making marketing matter, and “Marketing Matters” is is an interesting notion.

Introducing “Marketing Matters” & Today’s Topic

Today’s topic is one that not only is part of a new series, but it’s really leaning into a a direction we’ve not taken.

And I really want to ask you for feedback on this one. That is, when we’ve gone to the end of it, I would love it if you would kinda tell me your thoughts as do we do more of these? Should we do more like this? Do we go farther down this direction? Or, “That was enough. Don’t do this again. Give me something else.” I’m I’m keenly interested. That’s not a tongue in cheek question.

This is really about driving value. So this is gonna be about thirty minutes. We’re gonna keep tight to our to our calendar.

You saw from the headline here, you know, keep marketing in its lane or put marketing’s lane and the hint, you know, being it’s not sales well. There’s a reason we leaned into that title and it’s some it it represents something that we observe literally all the time in the market. So I wanna ask a couple of polling questions upfront just to kinda see the conversation.

Poll 1 Question

I wanna, I’ll ask you another one as we get a little further down the path of this. But just to kinda get a sense of of who’s with us in in this particular chat, let me ask you this question first.

What describes your primary role? I realize some of you may, in fact, wear more than one hat. Many of us do. But if you are primarily responsible for leadership and marketing sales or other areas, that’s super helpful. Thank you for weighing in so quickly.

Give you a couple more moments, and then we’ll close and then share back what what everybody sees. And that’s how we’ll do each of these. Alright. Thirty seconds was enough. Thank you everybody for for this. 

Poll 1 Insights

So this is what you shared with us. We’re a mixed group.

Marketing leadership, sales leadership, owner or c level wearing lots of hats. And that is exactly typical, I think, in some in in some respects. And something I’ll ask you guys perhaps in in a separate moment only because it’s not always easy in a short session like this to ask everybody, you know, to to to be live. But I’m, you know, I’m curious as to how you perceive these challenges from your role since we don’t all wear the same hat on this.

But thank you for that. The second question is this one.

Poll 2 Question

Where does marketing fit in your organization? How is it positioned? Is it appear to sales? Would you regard it as being on equal footing? Does marketing report to sales? Does sales report to marketing? It doesn’t happen very often, but it it could. Marketing?  What marketing? It could be a legit answer or something else. 

Poll 2 Insights

Alrighty. So we end the poll and share back, and maybe this this is interesting to me. Marketing reports to sales.

Interesting that in this particular group, we had no responses to first one, that marketing is a peer to sales. Let me give you a kind of a spoiler alert. That’s where we’re going in this conversation. The extent to which marketing is not on the org chart as a peer to sales can create structural imbalances that can then lead to marketing being less than optimal in terms of of its performance potential for your business.

It’s really as straightforward as that.

Some of you suggested marketing not really on the org chart at all. Meaning, we’re we are aware of it. Maybe we don’t have a formal function. We don’t have someone who wears the hat that says that person is is our lead leader of marketing.

That happens a lot, especially in technical organizations, especially in our in our industry, which also suggest that maybe the the best that you can take away from this session is understand the why as to where does it where could it fit in in your business? Where should where might it fit? Our purpose here as I as I will always mention to you is that you not hear conversations like this as infomercials. They’re just not. We love sharing. We love elevating these kinds of conversations.

And if it helps you think through your business and your potential, awesome. We’ve done our job.

If we can be helpful in the future to helping you think through or get things done, well, of course, we love to. That’s what we live for every day. But this session and these sessions like these are really about sharing what we see, what we observe, what what matters, and to the extent that we can give you our insight as to why. So let me let me take this a step further now.

and thank you for for weighing in. I think everybody did there. Okay. So and we take this further.

Confusion Between Sales and Marketing

There are there are certainly any number of opportunities, and then you may have experienced this either in your business or with that of your clients or even industry partners. And that is there’s it’s often a fuzziness between sales and marketing. As in, aren’t they really two sides of the same coin? Aren’t they kinda like the same thing?

It’s in marketing. Kinda like sales with nicer fonts. It’s a wink wink. But the reality is we see companies talk about sales, but they use the words of marketing. They talk about marketing as if somehow it were sales. They’re not. It’s really, really important to appreciate. These are distinct functions. It doesn’t mean we don’t all wear multiple hats, and sometimes I have to have my marketing hat on and sometimes I am wearing my sales hat, but how I think about that role and how I execute that role are not the same.

And we talk about how we use email, how we use social, how we use our website, how we use events. Are we talking about sales? Are we talking about marketing? Are we talking about relationship building? Are we talking about creating pipeline? There’s a lots of different ways of of delineating it and in the in the short session here, I don’t wanna get I don’t want you to get too bogged down in the nomenclature of it. But it’s really about understanding first and foremost, if they’re not the same, let’s be really clear about what they’re supposed to be. Alright?

So we take this a little further. Right?

Defining Sales

Sales. Sales, of course, is revenue. It’s revenue related. It’s building to conclusion. It’s earning the opportunity, and it’s closing sales. It’s understanding what needs are all about.

And I’ll share an anecdote with you. This is part of my own personal path to getting here, frankly. That is I didn’t go to school originally with a notion that I would have a role in marketing. I was a business major. I was interested in finance. I became, I went into banking. I went into I was a a registered rep. I was with a broker. I had I had a manager and supervision supervisory, you know, licenses. I had options principal licenses as well. And I went into day database consulting and wound up at Korbel that became SunGard, and I was on the product side for a long time. I led the trading group for a long, long time and became critical of our marketing, and was given a wonderful opportunity to lead marketing for what some of you might know as Relius and Omni in in the marketplace. And in doing so, I became part of a group of marketers across dozens of brands in the SunGard universe around the world who talked about marketing and they used the word “pragmatic.”

Well, that was a really, really good word. Marketing should be pragmatic. It shouldn’t just be fluffy. It shouldn’t just be pretty. It should be pragmatic. It should have actual purpose. The wink wink about all this is that I was the only one who didn’t realize in these conversations. I was the only one in the conversation that didn’t realize when they were talking about pragmatic marketing, they were not just talking about an idea, they were talking about a company and they had all been through training by pragmatic marketing.

So, when they referred to pragmatic marketing ideas, they were really referring to the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. 

Pragmatic Marketing Framework

This is the pragmatic marketing framework and, I’m curious, in my show of hands, if you’ve seen this or something like this before.

Every one of these boxes is a marketing function. And to the left represent more strategic kind of of of ideas and execution or tactical leans to the right. But in total, if you just scan these and by the way, you’ll get this deck if you like. You’re gonna see lots and lots of different boxes. Every single one of them is a marketing function.

None of them are sales. That’s the key here. These are all under the hat of marketing. It’s not necessary that your your business needs or or needs to understand or do all of these and certainly not all at the same time, or that you have one person or a group for all of these. In some businesses, there are a lot of different people who own lot of these individual boxes.

The point, of course, as I’m saying is that these aren’t these aren’t sale these are not the responsibility of sales.

If your sales function is robust, you need your sales people and your sales leaders to be focusing on the things that they do so well every day, and having them take time to do these things is likely not not the best and highest use of their time either. It’s also true that your marketing function and your marketing talent, and whether that is vested in in a in a CMO or a director of marketing or whatever your title is, or a group of product or service marketers, whether it’s about communications or social or event marketing or any number of things that happen here.

Notice all the things on the left that describe market problems, win loss analysis, our distinctive competencies, our distribution strategy, our comp our our knowledge of the competitive landscape.

All of those are ideas that take real time and effort to understand to understand where do we position in the market?

Where do we differentiate?

If we don’t know where we sit vis a vis our own competitors, we tend to be a a repeat of our own pattern. We talk about ourselves the way we’ve always talked about ourselves. We provide the services we provide. Not always understanding, are the messages we’re sending out even interesting to anybody else?

Or are they by happenstance exactly like everybody else?

And as you get through understanding buyers and buyer personas and the requirements of the marketplace and the idea of creating output that sales can use, and if you look at programs and readiness and support, we’re talking about all the things that are helpful to sales but again, this is the partnership that marketing can bring. The pragmatic marketing framework is is is intended to to prepare folks who are new on that path to this idea. And I’ll tell you I was a happy student of of this idea. And I continue to use it in my thinking, well, all the time.

That’s the whole point. Right? So

Defining Marketing

marketing is about paving that that road ahead. Right?

It’s about get get creating the awareness that we need, creating demand, and then shaping perception and preference. And that last one, of course, is where we think about creating thought leadership content, creating insight, describing that we’re interested in in more than just providing products and services that we understand the problems the industry has. We understand the problems customers have.

It is also a a a subtle but elegant way of answering the question, why should I choose you? When any number of firms might have the requisite people and processes and technologies to do the job, so to speak.

Well, why should I choose you? Why? Because we have a better sense of how to make you successful and that’s what our marketing is all about. How do we how do we know that? Because we did the research, we did the competitive analysis, we understand where to position, all of those things.

My purpose here is is to really condense a lot of these ideas and obviously in the in the in the in the moment that we have here for thirty minutes. But hopefully to help create some clarity around what is an idealized way of looking at it. And I don’t expect that you go to go from zero to a hundred on anything. But if you make incremental progress or have the ability to to think about it differently, if you can take one step forward, you can do one thing differently tomorrow than you did yesterday, then my hope is that there’s some value in in the illumination of this idea.

So we go past the the the this framework and we say, okay, fine.

Strategies Come Before Tactics

That means strategy and tactical. You saw that in the left side and the right side of the framework.

You’ve also heard me say from time to time, perhaps, it’s always why before how. Right?

Why does this matter before I demonstrate how it works? Certainly, if you’re the customer, you say, I need to know why this matters to me before I care to spend time to learn anything about, well, how is it you deliver on on your promise? You may have a fourteen step program, you may have a sixteen step delivery, whether that is a a plan design, you know, a record keeping experience, whether it’s learning about your your investment, you know, opportunities, maybe it’s your fiduciary program. All those are very interesting if and only if it matters to me. And the why is why should it why does it matter to me? So when we think about strategy versus tactical marketing, we’re always considering strategy first.

Because if we don’t, it’s really, really easy to get busy and stay busy doing things.

Doing things like social media campaigns and email campaigns and videos and even webinars like this. The purpose being, we can say we did a lot of work. We called it marketing. Our brand was out there.

We touched a lot of folks, but what did it was it aligned to our purpose? Was it aligned to our our our goals? And I mean sales or revenue goals or business goals. That’s the whole point of strategy sitting on top, is to ask the right questions first and then implement with the tools that matter to you. Because the truth is, there are a lot of things you can do, and they all take money and time.

And maybe they’re not all the same, but it’s all it’s all resource time, and that does matter.

When Marketing and Sales Work Together

So if we think about this a little further about how how might you think of it best, well, this is where I think of it most. Marketing sets the table.

Sales serves the meal.

We’ve said for a long, long time marketing sets the table. It’s our way of of making really clear we stay in our box. Marketing is not sales, but marketing has to do its job well if sales has the potential to be optimized.

So we’re talking about creating awareness and not just awareness, creating this this environment within which people are receptive to listen to us.

Why? Because our message is interesting.

We’re speaking their language. We’re speaking to their needs, not just the bullet list of all the services we know how to provide and why they’re not easy.

Right? You’ve earned the experience. You’ve earned the knowledge. You’ve earned the capacity to serve.

It’s, by the way, timely and accurate doesn’t sell.

Just saying.

Sales engages when prospects are ready. Together, we get this done.

So I wanna

Poll 3 Question

ask another poll question right here. I wanna ask you about how you think about your business and the extent to which marketing and sales are or are not aligned.

So it goes like this.

How will our marketing align? And by the way, I’m not asking you to define exactly what alignment means, and I’m not asking you to score it. I’m just saying, yeah, we’re in sync. Maybe we’re somewhat aligned, but really we’re not or maybe we haven’t had reason to think about it.

Poll 3 Insights

So the the the breakdown in our in our group here is interesting. Split between somewhat aligned and not really sure, or maybe we don’t have any reason to actually think about it in a in, you know, a constructive way.

Nobody here said we’re totally in sync.

Now as I told you upfront, when when when I asked the polling question a little earlier, which was this one, is marketing peer to peer to sales? and at that time, the answer was no. Not not really. Not in anybody’s organization today.

Okay. Well, it’s not a surprise then that if that’s the case, it’s not surprising to me that you would say, no. We’re not really in sync. We have shared goals and great communication because it would seem like that would be a stretch.

But somewhat aligned is helpful, but it means there’s room. and in that idea, there’s opportunity. So in my effort to make these actionable conversations, what I’m thinking about is how do we how do we suggest things how do we suggest ideas that you can use?

So let’s take that a little further. Do marketing

Spot Disconnects in Your Own Process

and sales agree on the ideal client profile?

Now this may seem super obvious, but I can tell you I’ve sat in rooms where salespeople had a very good idea of who they thought their audience was. And marketing says, no. Our best opportunities are a different audience completely.

They weren’t even talking to or creating content for or pitching to the same folks on the same frequency.

It happens.

Is there a same under is there a shared understanding of what we call a quality opportunity?

If we think so, then we have a sense of what’s rational in terms of how to how much to invest in them and the way to reach them are our goals aligned, of course.

How You Can Act on This Knowledge

So let me offer you these four. These are four ideas for consideration.

You might do any of them. You might do one of them, frankly.

Or this might just give you an idea to do something like them.

But I’m gonna suggest to you though that that every one of these are doable, and that’s my point. This is not just, hey, this was nice to think about, but how do I use this information?

Each one of these has the potential to create marketing clarity, to create alignment between marketing and sales, and by doing so, can help you sharpen your message, to sharpen your targeting, and to to to help you and your people feel like they’re on the same page. So the first one that you see, of course, is survey your best clients. Now you might choose to survey all your clients.

And what and what I mean by that is not a satisfaction survey. A lot of companies do that. Are you happy with the quality of our work? Would you satisfaction survey. A lot of companies do that. Are you happy with the quality of our work? Would you recommend us?

Those are great, but that’s not what I mean here.

What I’m suggesting is surveys that that it reveal, not just why you chose us, but what do you value in the relationship with us? What do we deliver that others don’t?

Or by the way, maybe that’s an optimistic view. Ask questions that are more open ended that that help you understand that that clients are in fact happy or not. That’s a whole another conversation, by the way, which is a topic about are are quiet clients happy clients?

Our notion is that’s a not safe assumption that because folks are quiet, that means they’re happy. We have too much evident to suggest differently. But asking asking the question is something that far too few firms do and constructing a simple survey demonstrates that you’re interested in the relationship because you’re asking the question. And by the way, if you ask the question, the respectful way to to manage the next step is to report back.

Not only to thank them for participating but tell them what you learned. Share. Here’s what we learned. Here are things we wanna we wanna continue doing.

We have ideas and some feedback that tells us what we might wanna do differently or better, or you’ve given us great ideas as to things that we can where how we can create value, in the future. The second one, audit your key messages. Now there’s an implicit expectation here that says you have a defined set of key messages.

Perhaps you do and I’m not gonna quiz you on this, but:

What what is your key message or your key messages? The notion here is to compare them to what do your clients actually care about? What are they responding to? What are what are the notions that here that that that matter? Are we actually speaking to their pain, or are we just listing features?

Auditing these together as a marketing and sales exercise, not only create collaboration, but create really important clarity that helps put people on the same wavelength. That helps.

Three, research competitor position and pricing. Now this may be something you do all the time, and then maybe you do something you from time to time. We tend to look at it when we’re doing a SWOT analysis, and we think about, you know, who else is out there.

But what are they saying? What’s their tone? What’s their promise to the market? How much do they charge? How do we line up against them? Do we want to line up against them? Are we trying to look like others? Are we really trying to differentiate?

If our purpose is to stand apart from the pack, then really keeping tabs on what our competitors are saying and doing is essential.

Now we can take advantage of of of the notion that at least some percentage of our competitors aren’t doing this at all. I mean, at all. And you know that. Right?

As enough from one year to the next or ever. So they’re pretty static.

Well, let’s not be the static one. Let’s use them as the backdrop or the the reference point and compare favorably when we’re we’re trying to understand how do we message to industry partners, how do we how do we message to customers, how do we message to to prospects.

Take the guesswork out of it.

The fourth suggestion here is to interview a few trusted partners. Now that’s not the same thing as necessarily just having a cup of coffee and a nice chat. And by the way, if any of you are gonna be at NAPA four zero one k summit, this coming week, I’d love to say hello in person.

and yes, have a nice chat if if you have time. But when we talk about interviewing a few trusted partners, we’re thinking about asking them from their point of view to be really honest.

What’s the what’s your perception of our brand? What is the perception you hear from others about our brand? Because they hear things you don’t hear. They see things you don’t see. They’re experiencing them away because they’re external to you in a way that you could approximate, you might guess. But if you don’t ask the question, you’re making assumptions, ask them.

This is a marketing function. This is not a sales function.

And in particular, if your relationships are head of sales to head of sales, I would encourage you to have somebody else ask the question.

Unless your relationship is so strong that you say, listen, I’ll tell you the the brutal truth. Right? Meaning, sometimes we talk about you saw on that on that pragmatic marketing framework, win loss.

Win loss says, hey. After we concluded an opportunity, if we won, let’s find out why. Let’s make sure we’re not just making assumptions that we we what did we do to earn it? If we lost, why?

Same thing.

But sales usually get so wrapped up in, and they’re the ones making their presentation that they’re they’re least likely to hear an honest response as to why. Because maybe it was you, or maybe it was your presentation, or maybe it was something that was beyond your control that you might hear defensively.

Sales tends to be more defensive than marketing tends to be. It’s just a perception.

But the but the notion here is to ask questions and to and to say, you know what? We haven’t done this in a while. I wanna ask you, your trusted partner, can I ask you a few questions about how you perceive us, how you perceive value, how you perceive our message, and how you think others do? It’s not science, certainly not any more than it is art.

And we say that the notion of art and science matter here together. And that’s what I wanted to suggest. But if you took one of these four and said we’re gonna do that in the next month, great. If you did all four of these in the next weeks or months, fantastic. If you’d like any help, you don’t necessarily have to hire us. If you have a question about how might I suggest this or would you look at the questions I’m posing, I would be happy to. Just understand that that’s always an open invitation. Okay?

Closing Remarks

So marketing supports growth when it’s in its lane and that’s the whole point of this topic and this title is keep marketing its lane. Don’t confuse marketing as sales and vice versa.

You know, there’s a there’s a notion here. You know, it’s kind of approximating things you hear in the market all the time. Marketing without strategy is like driving without a map. You might move fast, but you can easily end up lost. Or if you are a George Harrison fan as I am, you might hear it as, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

Kinda like the same thing, isn’t it?

I’m gonna say thank you, for for taking time with me. If you’d like to talk about your lane and about your needs, don’t hesitate to reach out.