Marketing vs. Sales

What's the worst hire you can imagine? To me it is hiring a sales guy to run a marketing department. Running a group of marketeers by holding sales numbers in front of them every single day might work in a call-center setting. But it kills the more strategic, relationship and story telling initiatives that marketing people thrive upon.

I recently experienced first hand what can happen to a marketing team when this type of mismatch becomes reality. It has led me to further analyze the opposite dimensions between Sales and Marketing strategies and their associated tactics. Why exactly are they opposites of something that companies need both in equal amounts. The results for now is the MASA - Marketing Sales - Framework. The reason why I developed this framework is to understand better how mobile e.g. would fit into today's marketing & sales activities. 

The MASA Framework in words
When looking for opposites in approach between marketing and sales I quickly got to the a list of interesting dimensions but let's first start by making clear what marketing is.


Marketing Marketing in the classic sense is about targeting your customer with the right price for the right product at the right moment at the right place. Sales is about facilitating the actual delivery and the final transactions, i.e. getting paid for what your products and services on offer.
But how does that map out in the strategic sense? Here are the opposites that should make that clear.


Individual vs. Mass
In an ideal world your product or service is delivered at the right time, place, price and location for EACH of your customers. In reality we have to take a couple of short cuts and assumptions to make that a cost effective process. 
In Sales the objective is to sell as much as you can to as many people as you can. 


Pull vs. Pull
From individual to Mass it is a small step to Pull vs. Push. if you're product is really needed the clients will find you and pull your services or products towards them. In Sales the assumption is to push the message through as many channels as you can. The word Spam comes to mind.


Pricing vs. Branding
When you're brand does not justify a premium pricing is quickly the other argument to convince clients to buy. This is clearly what's happening to Nokia smart phones in many countries. Although feature wise and from a cost perspective these phones are comparable to iPhones and most Android devices, they often sell for ridiculously low prices. The Nokia brand has lost its mojo and a sales strategy is put in place to save the bottom line. 


Reach vs. Targeted
Sales is about reaching your audience in as many places with a standardized message. Marketing is as per the Individual vs. Mass approach, more about optimizing your products for your consumer's desires or the other way around (think iPad), creating a need that nobody had before and filling it in at the same time with the right product or service. Targeting in this setting goes beyond segmentation. It is more about timing and location and about understanding your client from a use-case perspective.


The MASA Framework
I created the the following graphic to illustrate the MASA Framework. It serves also as a way to classify the various communication channels that both Sales & Marketing teams use to execute their strategies. 

How MASA can be useful


When putting this framework in front of clients, the first reaction often is; 'well that springs no surprises'. I think that's fine because it serves as a tool to connect the dots between e.g. a companies mission statement and its current Marketing & Sales strategy.
Here are a few examples.


Mission Statement
If you are in the business of selling health products to consumers you definitely need to have a Sales strategy. But if your Missions Statement says you want to become the trusted advisor that people turn to to improve their health you seriously need a marketing strategy. Connecting both to the Mission Statement becomes easier using the MASA framework. It is easier to combine Mass Advertisement and Pricing strategies with building up a reputation as a health advisor. Using the framework in discussions with a client we quickly identified opportunities by reshuffling tasks among existing resources and introducing new elements on the website. 
In a later stage the development of an advisor application for iPhone and Android is in the planning. The app will not only be a source of information but it will drive sales by serving up targeted products to users with a certain profile only. We're still debating if that would imply a price reduction but by looking at the balance between marketing and sales and the expected move upwards in image the pricing becomes a less important topic and serving up a good quality product with good references becomes more important all of a sudden.


Hiring the right people
Discussing the current marketing and strategy plan using the MASA framework will help you to understand whether you're dealing with a sales-guy trying to polish up his image in an interview by presenting himself as a marketing expert, or the other way around.


Fitting mobile into the mix
As Maarten Albarda VP of Global Connections at InBev said at DeMexCo "The future is mobile, and nobody has really cracked that yet. Is it just another screen for distribution or is it more than that?"
The MASA framework can help finding the best way to integrate Mobile as both a Marketing and Sales tool into your business. You will quickly understand whether it has value by serving as a loyalty channel or tool. As a marketing director you may have wondered about the value of a mobile site. By looking at the Reach versus Targeting and Pull vs Push aspects it might be clear that a mobile site should be more personal and should be based on a Pull mechanism more that a standard website.


Understanding the Luxury Business
In the luxury business the acquisition of a product is often the result of a long preparation process in which the client dances around the brand, touching it through various channels to then time the ultimate moment of buying himself into the brand's reality when he or she is ready. It is here where Sales are almost a no-fly zone. Mass advertising, selling on Price and Pushing the product to the market is unthinkable. So if Mobile is going to be added to the Marketing mix it should be about Pull, Targeting, Individual tactics supporting the Brand. Now while this seems a no-brainer, with the MASA framework it will be easier to take a decision e.g. about m-commerce, i.e. direct sales of your luxury products.


Aligning Marketing with Sales
The model can provide the basis for an alignment between Marketing and Sales. By understanding the differences in objectives and better mapping out the ownership of advertising versus social and narrowcasting versus campaigning the necessary alignment between both departments can be managed better.




The state of MASA
The MASA framework is still work in progress. I am looking at refining the dimensions and the 'Umfeld', i.e. the Advertising, Campaigning, Social Media and Narrowcasting part.
I'd be happy to see feedback from your side and start a discussion.




For further reading
Marketing Week - Brand guardians can bridge great divide
Marketing Insider - How to Align Marketing with-Sales

Harvard Business Review - The new Path to the C-suite

> Specifically the section about the Chief Marketing and Chief Sales Officer.

The IT and marketing divide in business - and why it should change

It must be a familiar experience to marketing and IT managers working in Fortune 500 or other large structures. Meetings where the marketing guys talk about brand image, user experience and design and how technology must enable this. Vice versa the tech-guys keep saying that security and scalability are important and that more systems to serve more channels will not fit into the budget.

The C-level insists on having measurable results and to be present in all marketing channels but most and above all on the mobile channel. Oh and of course budgets went down again for next year.

Will this ever work? Without disruptive changes in the way businesses are run today I don't think so. Here's why.

If you're in digital marketing and brand management you ignoring the importance of digital technology is clearly a risk. But likewise, IT managers will have to enter in discussions with the marketing guys since usability, user friendliness, privacy and security issues are so closely related to what technology can and will enable.

In fact today marketing agencies and marketing managers are more successful if they understand technology and are able to have a fairly deep discussion with the IT guy. Take an iPhone application e.g. If you have no clue on what services and features are available on a device and how they can add value to your customers or how it will help you in your campaigns, your IT guys will effectively control your outcome.

But everybody with a bit of experience on either side knows how tough it is for marketing managers to talk about API's, database architecture and offline/online service availability. But IT managers have the same issue with softer values such as user friendliness and great user experience. Nothing better than a command window where you can direct call a services with a bunch of Unix command lines.

So fine, the stage is set and we understand the roles and know the players. But how can a business solve this issue? What is needed to bridge the divide between UX and IT?

Here are a couple of thoughts

Hybrid Teams, hybrid resources

Marketing should not be the exclusive domain of the marketing people. In fact in the most successful projects I've delivered the client had IT and Marketing people in every meeting. The project brief was created by marketing but had to be signed off by an IT director. Although this leads to more effort and increased work load at first, there is efficiency gained at the end of the project because technology supports the creative idea and vice versa. Nobody can hide behind arguments such as: we were never told it had to be this way or we could have told you that this design cannot be enabled by our IT infrastructure.

Finding hybrid resources or training them can be tough. There is a reason why IT developers love code and they don't care much for design. Research shows that human beings do function differently and some of us will just never understand design, others will never be able to read or produce a single line of code. So the most likely options is to have senior resources that over time have built up a hybrid expertise and can bridge the gap between the two disciplines.

MarkITing

More and more toolkits, campaign platforms and white labeled app development concepts are thrown onto the market. Running a campaign on Facebook does not require any deep IT skills unless you want to develop a game. We're slowly moving towards a world where anybody can run a campaign much like anybody can write and publish a book these days, thanks to all the software and digital print services available.

That means that marketing will have to include more 'light' IT skills so that campaigns on Facebook, SEO-tactics and tweets can be managed in an agile way.

Reversely the role of IT will have to include controlling and checking of third party services such as Facebook. Whether this means that pure 'hardcore' in-house software and platform development will be reduced remains to be seen.

Business need to change

The toughest part though is how businesses are organized today and how this will have to change. Hybrid teams and changing skill sets or in the services provided are probably easy to achieve via HR and the strategy department. But is it actually still a good idea to keep IT and Marketing separated. In digital marketing the combination of skill sets within one department will lead to more stride but in my opinion also to better campaigns and better branding.

But maybe this change should go even further. Social Media marketing requires different profiles. A Social Media marketing manager might as well come from the public sector. Softer social political skills might as well be the necessary quality to make a brand successful on mobile and in the social media space.

Now how to measure

Classic touch point measurement as in Unique Visitors, Conversion Rates and Click Troughs will remain important. But how do you measure mobile success or social media success? Should you track the number of Likes, the Evaluations your product gets on Amazon, the number of Friends the brand has? This and other ways of tracking your campaign in the digital space require again resources that have a marketing and IT understanding of the playing field.

Education

Its encouraging to see how Social Marketing, SEO and mobile are popping up as topics in the programs of Business Schools, Universities and Academies. The jury is still out on the quality of these initiatives. Fact is that there are executive programs that address these topics so there's no excuse for execs and board members to continue going uneducated about these topics.

So ultimately

Change is necessary and looking at the current pace of change in digital marketing and branding this is change will be a more and more pressing issue on the agenda of the C-level. Let's see and track how this pans out in the future and how it will improve the playing field for marketeers, IT managers and their agencies.