The Importance of a Marketing Driven Corporate Culture

Part 2 – of “Focus on Business and Marketing Strategy”

I mentioned in the previous post this notion of corporate culture, whether it is sales-driven, engineering-driven or marketing-driven. Why is this so important?

Following are some descriptions of two fictitious examples, one that emulates a sales driven culture and another that is engineering driven. Please note these are extreme in their description to make a point, but nuances of these examples will show up in just about any corporate setting.

The Corporate Climate

The Sales Driven Culture

Three top salesmen run the show. What they say goes. These sales reps myopically focus on the sale, sometimes at any cost. There is little no overarching business strategy, or product road map they act from what is in front of them at any given moment. These are not lazy individuals; on the contrary these employees make things happen. They are on the phone building relationships making deals and negotiating with management to ensure they can close the sale. They give management and product managers the inside scoop of what customers are saying about their products and the competition. They really do sell a lot, so it is hard not to listen to them or have them start taking over many of the marketing and product management systems within a company.

The challenge is this sales-driven culture creates an extremely subjective view of the world, specifically from inside the mind of a sales focused individual.  The sales mindset is generally focused narrowly on who they can sell what to in the fastest time.

How many times have the trainers who are installing the products and customer support representatives had to back track and bring management in to save a sale after the fact.  How many times have you heard this: “the sales rep told the customer that the product could do many, many things it was never designed to perform” or “end users have not been able to achieve the results they were sold.” In addition the “insider information” retrieved by sales staff are often based on their single minded focus to make a case for closing the sale. Sales reps are not bad, or dumb or evil, they are amazingly good at selling and that is what they will do both within the company and outside to customers. And while they deliver the revenues there is a cost, and that cost is focus and strategy and eventually a frenetic corporate environment created by each sale and the “crisis customer,” meaning “we won’t get this sale if we don’t bend over backwards; discount; change the product etc. The results is a company that is more or less run “by the seat of the pants” moving from one customer crisis to the next.

Engineering Driven Cultures

The CEO started the company working out of his garage and living room inventing some remarkable technology or engineering feat that will establish a new paradigm in… you name it. They toil and patent, make new discoveries and patent, innovate and patent. They are brilliant and can tinker and tweak forever. However, this type of mindset is great at product development and creation but generally not so good at selling. Engineers are also awesome project mangers, they really know how to get things done, yet they are generally not the best strategists.

If you want a technology product to be done to a set of specifications (that another engineer generally created), then no problem, the engineer will deliver. The problem is the specifications are based on the engineer’s way of thinking and often not on the customers. The product may be complete but it might not meet the market need. It will meet what an engineer perceives to be the market need which, if you have worked with many engineers, is quite different than the needs of a majority of everyday customers.

What both sales and engineering also have in common is a focus on the attributes and features, the “what it does” of the product not on the benefits or the “what pain it is solving”. This is a fundamental challenge that every company will face at some point in its lifecycle, developing a business and marketing communications strategy that will ensure that all constituents understand how they will benefit by working with or buying from this company.

What an engineering culture will create is a well made product that is never done. The product development could continue forever as the engineering mind gets yet another idea of another feature to add. There is also a certain bull-headed stubbornness, and a sense that the engineer with his/her clear thinking linear mind sees more clearly than everyone else and is therefore “right.” This mindset is important to the creation of the product but when it comes to marketing and selling what seems obvious and even easy to an engineer might in reality take much more time and creativity than a project management mindset can embrace. Also when an engineer is right it also means everyone else is wrong and eventually this engineer becomes frustrated with others “not doing their jobs.” In turn the employees get frustrated for not being able to do their jobs properly because of unrealistic expectations and knowing that it isn’t as linear a process.

Sales- and engineering-driven companies are less strategically focused; they spend a lot of time on reaction and on tactics, without a clear plan for what they are doing and why. These companies are often at the mercy of market conditions instead of creating them.

The archetypal marketing-driven culture from a sales and/or engineering perspective would be one of slickness and spin. They often see it as a culture of manipulation through airy fairy tactics with little to no hard evidence they work. In reality the marketing driven corporation is making all business decisions based on the impact on sales, lead generation and communications to current clients. Let me give you an example of a marketing-driven decision. This is an excerpt from my book The Credibility Factor:

I was working with two clients that offered complex technology solutions. We were charged with generating press articles for them to increase the credibility factor and attract customers. One company had done very well with sales and garnered a decent volume of customers. The other had one customer. Now, who do you think got the most press coverage? You would think it would be the one that had a volume of customers, right? It would make sense that more people were buying from that company, so it would seem to be more successful and thus have more credibility. In fact, the client with one customer received the most press articles. That was because that company had a board of directors that had industry luminaries on it, it brought in a CEO who was well known in the industry, and its one customer was one of the top 10 brand names in the world. Having this well-known customer added tremendous credibility. “If that brand-name company will buy it then it must be good” is the thinking that tool place in the market.

The company that had the one marquee customer made a marketing driven decision, namely to pursue that one customer to garner the credibility by association. The other company was typical in its attention to “going for the sale at all cost” and focused almost entirely on the features of the product and not the points of credibility or the benefits (what pain it is solving for its customers). Marketing-driven decisions really mean business-driven decisions; look past the sales to the strategy and how the sale would enhance the brand.

The next posting in this series will discuss how to differentiate through sound messaging: “Clear differentiation from competition (creating a brand message that is embraced by all constituents).”