Amazing to see how several industry sources are talking about the need to get serious about systematizing B2B marketing and sales alignment. This is good news because it supports directly our mission statement as well.
I’m also noticing a lot of new editorials and studies referring to a new model for the marketing org chart that is radically different from what we typically find today. It seems that the new breed marketing and sales department should be organized according to three major (sub)functions: branding, demand creation and revenue, with demand creation containing product marketing and field marketing. I think they’re right on. I only have a problem with the concept “demand creation.” More about that later. It’s all about making sure that you orchestrate your market-facing activities. If you want to create alignment, then at some point you need to “institutionalize” this, I guess…
I’m also pleased when I read that the industry clearly starts making a difference between product management and product marketing. They are indeed totally different animals. But here also lays my point of criticism. Where do you put product management? Not any longer in the marketing department? In the engineering department then? Well, I don’t think I would agree…. That would downgrade product managers to project managers thinking in pure technology terminology. And IMO project management is only a fraction of what a product manager should do.
The need for marketing and sales alignment is huge. The current opportunity costs of not having a buttoned up process runs in the billions of USD’s. But let us not throw away the child with the bath water by building an organization that assumes that the product and technology set is given and correct from day 1. Or that that every little component of the technology set should always be build and not bought, because that is what you will get by placing product management in the engineering camp.
Let’s make sure that product management still is an (inbound) marketing function as well. That it is a function that also embraces market feedback. Especially in technology departments the folks that write the PRD (product requirement document) should also have marketing blood running through their veins. If you don’t organize that well enough then you risk maybe solving the sales and marketing alignment issues. But what would be the value of this, if the product/solution set it tries to bring to market is not compatible with what the market wants or needs?
Let’s not make the mistake of trying to solve the marketing and sales alignment deficiencies by creating a new chasm between engineering/product development and marketing. Maybe I’m misinterpreting some of these editorials which is caused by nomenclature noise and maybe we’re all saying the same thing and is product marketing also responsible for some of the functions of the old school product manager. Nevertheless I’d like to make sure we are on the same page. If not then I think that the current trend to improve sales and marketing alignment happens at expense of something else that we’d fixed before. Indeed defining the right business processes that ensure the organization to come up with technological innovation and solutions in function of the market, is something many technology companies did get better at.
A last comment that builds my case here: many of these new breed marketing guru’s talk about “demand creation”. Maybe this is again a nomenclature debate but imo you can’t create demand. You can discover demand, develop products and solutions for it and then improve your go to market strategy to help identify those in need. Focusing only on the latter is simplifying the problem and is assuming that you have the rights products and solutions built.. We all know that this is rarely the case.
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