“How do you explain the difference between sales and marketing?”
For the past few weeks I have been reading a LinkedIn subgroup’s responses to this simple, straightforward question. A global collection of electronic connections have been flinging guesses back and forth like aerial salmon lobbed around Seattle’s famed Pike Place Flying Fish.
As of this morning, 56 attempts have been made to answer this. Three, in my opinion, are on-point and the rest range from silly gibberish to clueless bombast.
This is not surprising. Since the recession the market is flooded with a million “instant experts” who know too little to deserve an audience but bang their pots and pans and clamor to have one.
In simple terms, marketing is moving products with ideas. Sales is moving products with actions. Brevity sometimes helps clarity, so if you know the answer spit it out. If you don’t know the answer, do not pretend you do — especially not with references to rabbits and Venn diagrams.
When a company seeks help in this important arena — profitable top-line revenue growth — it must first understand the distinct and separate objectives of these two functions (marketing’s ideas vs. sale’s actions); and it must study an important third consideration, the blur in between that bridges the two.
As the scattergram of bell curve answers to this simple question showed, the odds of picking a skilled talent by blind guess is an odds-against proposition because those who do not know significantly outnumber those who do.
Four kinds of “Experts” hawk insight. We’ll look at each and then share the best way to pick the right person to hire to help solve your immediate challenge. The four are:
- Subject matter experts.
- Parrots.
- Pseudo-pros.
- Empty suits.
Subject matter experts (SME). These good folks honor their profession by being great in their space. Their reputations are earned and much of their business comes by referral. These people know a ton and their expertise is never by accident — it comes from hard work, innovative thinking, relevant research, and experience.
Typically a SMEs communication skills will be outstanding. He or she will ask relevant questions, listen well, strive to simplify complex problems, identify root causes, and explain how positive change must come about. A SME is confident, not arrogant, and will not cave or crack during tough situations.
Because a SME creates intellectual capital, he or she is willing and able to share it.
Wisdom has value and SMEs have wisdom, so the value proposition for a SME is typically very high. Because these professionals know what they are doing, they work quickly and efficiently.
Parrots. Parrots repeat what they have read or heard from others but lack innovative thought, vision, and insight. These are people of limited skill and utility, since they only know what others have shared. Never good for issues dealing with strategic vision or repositioning. Parrots repeat someone else’s intellectual capital but do not think it up.
Parrots typically provide so-so client value, because maximum value comes from insight and intangibles. They know where to find information but do not create it, so their utility will be limited to compilation and distillation of others’ ideas.
Pseudo-pros. These are middle-of-the bell-curve performers whose bombast exceeds their cerebral equity. They will tell you how good they are. When faced with a choice between someone who tells me how good he (or she) is and someone whose reputation you learned about from others, always go with the referral.
A SME lives on the cusp of change. The parrot will mimic new thoughts and ideas of the SME. The pseudo-pro isn’t that ambitious: He or she are one-trick ponies that are slow to grow, evolve, and change. Since they only change by accident or necessity, theirs is a reactive modernization — rather than one that is clever, innovative, or forward-thinking.
Because of this, a pseudo-pro’s value proposition is low. They will work cheap but you’ll get what you pay for.
Empty suits. These knuckleheads pollute my profession. They talk more than listen, and babble on about their “experience” as a credential rather than demonstrating an evolutionary body of work. A million empty suit “coaches” float around out there now, tarnishing the work place for those who have invested much of their professional lives helping others succeed.
These fakers lead with their mouths, not their ears, and typically produce such poor work they can sour a company or executive on ever hiring another. Empty suits work cheap and never worth half what they charge.
I define empty suits this way: “If they knew half as much as they think they do, they’d know twice as much as they really do.”
How to Find Help
Although there are five steps to problem-solving completion, manage the top three when deciding who to hire.
- Identify (in a macro sense) what’s broken. Is it marketing, sales, or the blur in between? Define it.
- Quantify the size of the problem. How much upside reward is there, if and when it’s fixed?
- Monetarily, what’s the number?
- Understand the domino effect. In what other ways could a great solution strengthen the business?
- Internally, how would things improve?
- Externally, with customers or versus competitors, how would things change?
- Based on the scope of the problem and upside reward of the solution, what kind of help do you need?
- If you need strategy, insight, ideas, and “watch out” identification, hire the Subject Matter Expert.
- If you know what you want to do and how you want it done — tactical execution — hire and monitor a parrot.
- If it’s grunt work, maybe you can save a nickel and hire a pseudo-pro. Pay a fixed price.
- Never blow a dime on an empty suit.
- Implement with commitment. Hold and manage the completion to an efficient timeline.
- Move beyond. Climb another mountain.
Profitable revenue growth is a challenge for all companies. Even when things are going well, all too soon something will derail profits or quota attainment. Good fixes come from understanding the different roles of marketing and sales, how they link, and then engaging smart people to outline and attack positive change.
Hopefully these ideas help.