IT Lead Generation Insider

In 1960 a paper appeared in the Harvard Business Review by Theodore Levitt called ‘Marketing Myopia‘. Many people regard this as the beginning of the modern marketing movement. Its theme was that most organisations had too narrow a vision of what business they were in, so perfume companies for example are in the business of selling dreams not nice scents.

As a specialist technology marketer I am sure that I, along with many clients, would admit to being guilty of often taking too narrow a view – it’s an occupational hazard of technical product marketing. However, there is another sort of myopia or short sightedness which afflicts too many marketing initiatives – the almost pathological reluctance of some marketers to allow sales to influence their campaigns.

Of course the communication gap between sales and marketing is a well know phenomenon about which much has been written, but by failing to listen to sales more carefully marketers are ignoring one of the richest seams of customer intelligence. And it’s free! There is no one who understands customers better than the sales team.

Arguably much marketing activity is necessarily an intellectual and speculative exercise and I don’t mean to over simplify or downgrade the role of marketing. Yes, I know we have much more data now with which to test our assumptions and that is great, but when we are trying to take that intellectual leap into the customer’s shoes we need help in order to make sure that marketing propositions are grounded in reality.

We need to have the courage to ask our sales colleagues…….

“What will sell?”

and sometimes…….

“What will sell in this prospect specifically?”

Recently we were asked to run a CRM sales lead generation campaign into Financial Services. The marketing brief praised the solution to the roof but when we spoke to the sales team their reply was they didn’t want any CRM leads as they knew this particular solution would not sell and they wanted to focus on more effective opportunities.

In another campaign we were asked to build detailed profiles of target accounts only to discover that several were already significant customers unknown to marketing.

Look, I know that marketing is not a perfect art but there is one thing I am 100% clear about if we don’t listen to sales and include their input in campaigns then we are sabotaging our own best efforts.