In the first part of this article I discuss how marketing has a visibility and credibility problem – they’re not seen as critical to business success and the results they present often don’t reflect business relevance. Due to this, marketing is primarily viewed as a support function to sales.

1. Why All Marketers Should Work In Sales
(At least at some point in their career)
(Part 1 of 2: The Challenge)
Overview
It’s often said that sales drives the business, but marketing drives sales. If that’s true,
then marketing is just as critical to business success as sales. However, that doesn’t
seem to be the case in most businesses. Marketing is often seen as nothing more than
a support role.
Why is that?
Because marketing has two primary challenges that need to be overcome: visibility and
credibility. This two-part article will help explain what can be done to overcome those
challenges.
Introduction
Sales and marketing. Marketing and sales. These two functions are intimately
interconnected and critical to a business’s success.
That’s good, right? As marketers, we’d like to think that everyone in the company
recognizes that fact. However, the truth is that sales is really the department that always
seems to get the credit and recognition when the company is doing well, and marketing
seems to be the department that always takes the hit or has budget and headcount cut
when the business is doing poorly.

2. Why is that?
Sales Sells
The short answer is that sales sells. Not only the company products and services, but
the sales people sell themselves, their function and their department as well. And they
do that internally, across the company.
Sales people know the importance of visibility.
Consider this: sales metrics, KPIs and sales results are a critical component of weekly
calls, monthly reports and quarterly meetings across the entire company. Executive
leadership teams are briefed on and provided updates about these data points on a
regular basis. The sales results drive annual sales conferences that almost everyone in
the company attends. Everyone except the marketing department, who has the
responsibility for organizing it, paying for it and making sure the sales conference
happens, but is often not invited to attend. Do you ever wonder why that is?
This happens because the sales organization knows how to blow its own horn.
Conversely, one of the main reasons (if not “the” main reason) that many marketers and
marketing departments don’t receive the recognition they’re due is that they really don’t
know how to promote themselves (i.e., “sell” themselves).
How can that be? They’re in marketing, after all. More than anyone else in the
company, they should know how to promote themselves. That’s what they do for the
company’s products, after all. And they must know how to do that or else the products
wouldn’t sell.
But they don’t.
While the marketing department may know how to promote the company products, the
truth is that most marketers don’t know how to promote themselves, their function or
their department. They don’t know how to call the right type of corporate attention to
what they do. They don’t know what metrics are really relevant to the business. And one
of the biggest problems is that they don’t present (or know how to present) their
activities and results in a manner that is relevant to the business.
Essentially, most marketers don’t know how to promote what they do, how they go
about doing it, what the results are, or how those results of their actions help drive
sales, and by extension, the success of the business. They just do their jobs and expect
that recognition will follow. But they hardly ever receive it.
Are we really surprised by that?
No. They’re not visible.

3. In addition, marketers also have a credibility problem. Other departments, senior
leadership and corporate executives don’t know what marketing has actually done that
helped drive the success of the business. They don’t see the planning and development
of assets. They don’t know about the months of research that go into understanding a
product, knowing the market and the competition, or knowing what channels to use to
most effectively reach the customers. They don’t understand all the logistics involved in
planning and executing an event that gets product in front of customers and provides
sales with the opportunities to meet customers. They don’t see all these actions that go
into helping sales make a sale.
And let’s face it, the sales guys don’t typically credit their success to the marketing
department, or to the events, materials and assets they use. Instead, more often than
not, they’ll complain about what marketing doesn’t provide, that they don’t have enough
leads, that the quality of the leads aren’t good enough, or that the leads aren’t the right
type. They’ll say that the marketing materials don’t give the customers the information
they need, that they’re not the right type of assets sales needs to facilitate
conversations with customers, or that the event isn’t the right type of event or doesn’t
attract the right audience.
In other words, marketing doesn’t help them sell. What type of message does that send
to the company?
Exactly.
Because of that, no one in the company often really knows what marketing has done to
help drive the success of the business. They think it’s all due to sales. And if marketing
does try to showcase their part in it, it often comes across as sour grapes or trying to
ride the coattails of sales.
Marketing credibility? I don’t think so.
Marketers Don’t Market Themselves
It’s true. Marketers don’t know how to market themselves. Too often they assume the
fact that they do their jobs is sufficient and that if it delivers results, they will be
recognized, rewarded, and promoted.
But how many marketers do you see being publicly recognized at corporate events?
How many do you see joining the President’s Club? How many marketers do you see
receiving huge bonus checks? How many marketers do you see going on all expenses
paid trips to the Caribbean?
I know. It’s a rhetorical question.

4. The sales guys are the ones who stand out. That’s because they’re the ones who not
only know the importance of self-promotion, they practice it on a regular basis. They
understand the importance of face time with senior management. They know that
keeping updated sales figures top of mind with the executives shows both their personal
and professional impact on the business.
Sales professionals know that it’s critical to their career development to blow their own
horns, so they keep track of their accomplishments and don’t let anyone in the company
forget them. Especially their management and the corporate execs.
Because of this, sales has budget. Sales has visibility. Sales professionals get raises
and promotions. Sales people get rewarded.
And marketing doesn’t.
In other words, sales professionals know how to sell themselves just as well as they
know how to sell a product.
Marketers could learn a lot from them.
Changing Paths
Okay, but I’m a marketer. I don’t want to be a sales guy. I don’t like to sell. I don’t want
to meet with customers. I don’t want to travel all over the place. I enjoy writing,
developing campaigns, creating messaging and positioning, writing white papers. In
other words, I like being creative and doing all of the other aspects of marketing that I’m
involved in.
Great. But you could always do more. Or do things better. Or most importantly, help
others across the company learn what it is that you as a marketer do and why your
function is critical to business success.
But you’ll have to prove this to them.
Unfortunately, the reality is that marketing is one of those areas that many people think
is easy. They think anyone can do it. Marketers often hear comments about how easy it
is to develop a website (it isn’t) or create a brochure (it’s not), so it can’t really be that
hard to do.
People don’t realize that marketing is a discipline and that marketers have to be experts
in their products, just as much as the sales teams are. They don’t understand that
marketers have to know how to apply the knowledge they gain from their research to
the various actions and assets they’re responsible for to most effectively engage with
customers. They don’t realize that marketers have to be able to collaborate and work
cross-functionally with numerous organizations across the business. And most

5. importantly, that in order to do their job right, deliver results, and accomplish the
business goals takes focus and hard work.
Of course, most marketers don’t help themselves by presenting “results” of their actions
through “metrics” such as click-throughs, number of page visits, number of shares,
number of attendees to a conference, number of visitors to a booth, or the number of
downloads a piece of content has generated. And truthfully, those aren’t metrics, they’re
measurements. They’re definitely not results.
Even as metrics, they’re not very good, as those are really nothing more than activity
(aka, “vanity”) metrics. They don’t tie a specific marketing action to a specific business
outcome. They don’t indicate how a marketing activity drove customers through the
sales funnel. They don’t show marketing providing strong, solid leads to the sales team
for them to close. Ultimately, they don’t show how marketing helped drive sales
revenue. All they really show is that some sort of activity took place.
In other words, they don’t show marketing’s relevance to the business. And that’s not
what business leaders want to see.
It’s no wonder then that marketing has no credibility and is typically viewed as a support
function to sales. They haven’t shown how they’re critical to business success.
Compare that to sales, who keeps track of and records in the CRM system all activity
related to the steps in the sales process: the number of times they’ve emailed or talked
to a customer, how often they’ve met with a customer, provided information to a
customer, given the customer a demo, or anything else that helps move a customer
down the funnel. They provide weighted estimates and probability of success for closing
the deal. They track budget spent vs. the size of the deal so that ROI can be calculated.
Sales people know how to show how each of these steps is part of the sales cycle a
customer goes through prior to making a purchase. They also have business goals that
they must meet, so they track and tie their activities to those goals, to show how all of
what they do (even taking a customer out for a nice meal) is business-related and helps
drive the sale.
Is it any wonder that sales professionals are recognized?
Marketing Can Learn a Lot from Sales
We know marketing has a credibility issue, which is why marketers have to change that
perspective. Marketers have to show how marketing activities drive customers through
the sales funnel. They have to not only deliver results, but show how those results are
tied to a specifically defined business outcome. They must be able to calculate
marketing ROI and be able to support that with hard data, not just with guesstimates.
Marketing contribution has to be defined not just in terms of activities, but revenue.
But how can this be done?

6. One possible step is to work in sales at some point during your career. Sales
departments are more revenue-driven and –focused than marketing departments
typically are, so working with and learning from sales could actually help your career as
a marketing professional.
Why?
And how?
We’ll discuss that in the second part of this article.
© 2021 – Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing
All rights reserved.