Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Everyone with an interest must surely be consulted?
Yet we know that this way lies sclerosis and disaster!
Let’s start with some hard practicalities and truths.
Commercial (senior) managers often sit in their ivory towers with little connection to on-the-ground realities. They talk to shareholders and the markets, and often decide to be driven by what the markets want them to achieve, rather than what market dynamics will support.
Don’t get me wrong… you will find detailed and (apparently) evidenced plans drawn up by corporate servants to back up these ambitious ‘strategic’ targets. The problem is that the starting point is frequently wrong.
Strong senior management look at what can really be achieved in the market (even if being disruptive) and tells shareholders and stakeholders about the art of the possible. In this best of cases, reality is driving market expectations… NOT the other way round. Sadly, such strength of mind and purpose from the board is rare.
Moving on, we then have the eternal conflict between sales and marketing.
Both are aggrieved because senior management rarely understand how sales or marketing works (per our point above).
Sales is beaten up about quarterly targets, often without reference to longer-term, strategic, sensible business goals – and certainly on more than one or two occasions without the resources to achieve targets that may simply have been plucked out of the air.
Marketing suffers from the fact that senior management and sales do not really understand what they do. Everybody notices when marketing is absent. One charming CEO called us back in to help her firm because, as she put it, since they dialled down on the marketing “We’ve become ****ing invisible!”
Yet few understand or respect the job marketing is doing when it is working. Part of the responsibility for that lies, of course, with marketers who are so up their own, that they don’t make the effort to explain their activities in clear and straightforward terms for the lay listener in senior management or sales.
This brings us neatly round to our original question – how widely to consult when putting a marketing initiative together.
The answer is, of course, a judgement call.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. Especially when stakeholders outside of marketing don’t have marketing experience, don’t really know how marketing works, and like to throw their two penn’orth without really knowing what they’re talking about.
Nevertheless, human nature is such that if stakeholders are not consulted at all, then they’re going to be resistant to adopting the initiative when it’s ready. Quite rightly!
The job of achieving widespread buy-in is often one for a true diplomat.
The initiative needs to be built on sound evidence (often best drawn from conversations or interviews with customers – nothing’s more convincing!)
It needs to be expressed simply and clearly and properly/convincingly connected to sales and operational targets/objectives.
If it does not feed tactical aims/goals, then its contribution to strategic aims needs to be well articulated and somehow measurable over time.
It needs to be driven by a confident and experienced team (usually a combi of internal and external).
And it needs to give stakeholders a voice without allowing them to railroad sound marketing planning and practice. In other words – “Have your say, but don’t try and (arrogantly) gainsay our marketing knowledge & skills.”
Like anything in this life, it’s easy to say, hard to do.
Perhaps the most important thing, at the end of the day, is mutual respect between commerce, sales, operations and marketing, where sneering negativity is put firmly to bed and everyone – whatever their current pressures – co-operates.
Easy to say, hard to do.
I hope you find these bulletins entertaining. I’m happy to discuss all relevant engagements – from customer community creation, to directorial mentoring, to strategy development, to thought-leadership content development, to full campaign structuring and management, and more.
Do get in touch!
