One carefully misspelled marketing concept coined here at VLG seeks to shed light on today’s marketing/advertising hysteria. Dialog Marketing is best described as sales enablement and best suited for B2B marketing.
Sales support remains the most important job for marketers. With all the distractions marketers face on the social media front, they can’t forget about sales. Sure sales would be quick to throw marketing under the bus, but sometimes it’s with good reason. (These two groups speak different languages, so look for excerpts from our Selling-Marketing Dictionary in the near future.)
In the meantime, let’s first take a look at marketing’s view of sales enablement. This usually involves marketing programs that disseminate information to the installed customer base or prospective customers, VARs, other channel partners, or maybe some vendors. It looks like this:
And even though the majority of marketing spend today is one-to-many, ask marketers what they are trying to accomplish and you’ll get this reply:
Marketing’s heart is in the right place, but most tactical solutions fall short. Meanwhile, sales has gone rogue. They are crafting one-off sales sheets, quickly built slide decks and other reactionary marketing collateral to achieve true one-to-one marketing to get revenue in the door.
Sales doesn’t know or can’t articulate what they need from marketing, which is why marketing can’t take all the blame for missed revenue goals. Sales just wants something from marketing that will deliver buyers and shorten the sales cycle. Right? Because the sales force faces two major selling paradigms and is incentivized to sell, sell, sell.
The CRM, a Rolodex by another name in most cases, drives the idea that building personal relationships helps close deals. Marketing can’t help but question this spend. It could be golfing, entertainment, whatever. Or, it could be far more complicated.
Now selling to a committee of self-interested parties debating a strategic and tactical answer to their own business woes. Anyone that has worked on the agency side of the marketing business knows that if their at 10 people in a creative review, you have 10 creative directors. Sales juggles the same challenges, especially for deals that require a capital investment.
In the end, the idea that you should help me is shared by both sides of the equation. The important thing for marketers to remember is that they are a cost center. Sales is a revenue center. If you aren’t working on ways to define yourself as a revenue center, you marketers, you’ll always be first on the chopping block in a down economy. Why? Because rogue salesman don’t need you to sell, yet.
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