I need to get a new car!

[BigMoneyJim]

Marketing styles the wheelbarrow; sales moves it around.

 

[Nords]

The difference, by definition, is Marketing defines new products/services, establishes pricing, develop market strategies/campaigns/promotion, identifies target customers, provides sales training, etc. Sales carry out  the strategies developed by Marketing. The focus is on making the sales target.

If Sales is carrying out Marketing's strategy, then why do they call it a "Sales" target?  Oh, right, in case Sales falls short of carrying out Marketing's strategy.  (Because if they exceeded the target, that was due to Marketing's great strategy too?)

Marketing styles the wheelbarrow; sales moves it around.

That's a much easier definition, although TH's is much more memorable for its poignant imagery. 

I'm still trying to figure out who gets more respect (and pay).  Do the Sales staffs sit around dreaming of being invited to join Marketing some day?  Do the Sales guys tell everyone that Marketing is for those who can't handle the Sales pressure?  Does Marketing have the best career track to CEO, and do they use it to beat down the "threat" from the Sales staff's careerists?

But I bet that would fuel an entire other thread... I dunno, joining the military to kill people and break things sounds a lot easier than a career in sales or marketing.  (Although not a lot different.)

 

[JB]

This looks like a cool surf mobile from Chevrolet.
Inexpensive, good fuel economy, and can hold all my surfboards, and windsurfing gear.

http://autoadvice.about.com/od/chevrolet/ss/2006ChevyHHR.htm

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

If Sales is carrying out Marketing's strategy, then why do they call it a "Sales" target? Oh, right, in case Sales falls short of carrying out Marketing's strategy. (Because if they exceeded the target, that was due to Marketing's great strategy too?)

Sales completely ignores marketing 90% of the time. Maybe if you come up with a few good slides they'll stick in a presentation. And ad and PR campaigns might help. Engineering might swing by a few weeks before a product is ready to ship to ask you what you think about it and what should go into it. If you really know what you're doing you get a lot more integrated into the product planning and design phases, and into the sales process.

Marketing also usually throws together the annual/semi-annual big 'sales conference' where mostly marketing folks give the product line pitches, profer 'sound bites' and offer at least one version of the world according to xyz corp. Sometimes that helps set a tone. Sometimes its just a nice opportunity for the sales folks to fly to a different city, drink a lot and hump each other.

I'm still trying to figure out who gets more respect (and pay). Do the Sales staffs sit around dreaming of being invited to join Marketing some day? Do the Sales guys tell everyone that Marketing is for those who can't handle the Sales pressure? Does Marketing have the best career track to CEO, and do they use it to beat down the "threat" from the Sales staff's careerists?

The studs in both groups get the pay and the respect. I dont think theres any ascention between the two. There is a certain amount of fairly good natured "those useless guys over there" thing between the two groups but its rather mild. Having been in both sales and marketing, I more or less prefer sales. Two very different personalities.

I think I've seen way more sales vp's go on to head up a company than marketing vps. Sales tends to produce leaders that can directly influence the troops and make whole strategies. Most of the marketing heads i've seen were smart guys who were not overtly strong leaders of people. Of course there were exceptions.

The really fun stuff happens between marketing and engineering. Most engineering folks consider marketing to be as useful as a quart of spit. I got a little respect as a former engineer, particularly since I worked on stuff they played with when they were kids. I worked for one startup that when they hit about the $50M mark they got bought by a very marketing driven company. Ours was a hugely engineering driven company. We had three marketing guys who honestly were pretty smart, but they could have stayed home all day every day and gotten the same results. The new company head broke engineering into three groups and put the three marketing guys in charge of the three groups.

What a bloodbath.

 

[Nords]

This looks like a cool surf mobile from Chevrolet.
Inexpensive, good fuel economy, and can hold all my surfboards, and windsurfing gear.

I like the look, but...

I guess it has to hold the boards inside because they put the frickin' antenna top & center of the windshield. And with the rack along the sides instead of athwartships, it'd be impossible to lash down a longboard on the roof anyway!

 

[Nords]

Sales completely ignores marketing 90% of the time. 

The really fun stuff happens between marketing and engineering. 

Thanks for explaining all of this, TH, it brings a lot more comprehension to my business reading. I understand the Dilbert jokes better too...

But for some reason I'm still attracted to buying the stocks of companies like these. No one would invent a marketing campaign like this, and apparently the salesforce wouldn't pay attention to it anyway, so it must be the great sales skills.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

No problem! We aim to please!

Nothing sums up the situation any better than a marketing/engineering meeting where an engineer goes on and on about a cool idea and one of the marketing people asks "what is the business reason why anyone would want to buy that?". You could cut the air with a knife.

But then again, when I was managing engineers you could go to the newest guy and ask him what he was working on. After he told you, you could ask him why he was doing it and he'd tell you the headcount savings the company would realize, or the financial impact and payback period for the work.

 

[laurence]

The only thing I remember from sales was when I was the lead tech/beta tester/software engineer for an estate planning document assembly program. They had a sales staff at HQ who were on the road more often than not to their various sales regions. But when they were in the office, they took turns goofing off with each other (crank calling on the company phone, shooting rubber bands at each other etc.) and making outrageous promises about the products next release we could never hope to achieve. Sometimes they'd ask me to come onto a sales call to help "close the deal" by answering technical questions. One time he had butchered explaining an issue to a potential customer and I cleared it up. With the sales guy still listening in, the customer said, "I get it, that's totally not how the sales guy explained it!" which I replied, "eh, he's sales, complex thoughts are not his forte."

....funny, that guy never asked me onto a call again.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Just think Lawrence, had you played ball, you might be spending your time right now shooting rubber bands at other guys instead of doing actual work

 

[KB]

My experience was with Sales and Marketing combined. They would sell some sort of tricky health care plan benefits and tell the new customer that we'd have their group ready to process in something like 2 or 3 months. The benefits were so strange, it took WAAAYYY more time and money than was worth to get the group. And in the long run, they'd lose money on the group. It took years before they standardized their benefits and stops selling weird stuff.

The clients they did this for were prestigous in name.....but not worth losing money over....

 

[Caroline]

The difference between sales and marketing: the marketing guy knows when he's lying.

LOL!

Actually, Marketing is the guy (or in my case, gal) who goes out and exhaustively researches the marketplace, the competitors, the technology, etc. and slaves over the production of a MRD (Marketing Requirements Document) telling Engineering what is needed for the product to succeed... say, features X, Y, and Z.

Sales is the guy who ignores the plan and sells the customer feature W to get the customer to sign the contract, then either a) comes back and pitches a fit until Marketing relents and includes feature W, or b) screws the customer and leaves a mess for Support to clean up.

(I'm not bitter, no siree!)

One of the happiest events of my product management career was having a Salesman come in and turn the air blue because I wouldn't change the product requirements to fit what he'd just sold a customer. He then went to the VP of Sales and Marketing and complained, and I was dragged onto the carpet to explain why, if Salesguy had a $2M deal in hand, I wasn't going to ask Engineering to alter the product. Unfortunately for the Salesguy I'd JUST completed a comprehensive poll of the customer base.

"I've got research here that tells me that 3 customers want what Salesguy just sold to his customer. But 45 customers want features x,y,and z and are willing to pay a total of $35M for them. If I build W for this guy, I can't build X, Y, and Z."

VP looked at the Salesguy and shouted "You heard her, get the hell out of my office."

Ahhhhhhhh... The memories...

I also remember Sales Manager asking me for a lot of extra information in the Sales Product briefing I wrote up each quarter. "I'm happy to put anything in there you want if it will help make sales," sez I, "but they're not reading what I already give them based upon the phonecalls I'm getting."

He insisted, and I did the extra work, BUT...

On page three I added the following sentence: "the first person who reads this and call me gets $100.00."

And then I waited. And waited... And waited...

Two months later a Sales person DID call and win the money, which I extracted from the Sales Manager's budget on the theory that I'd done him a considerable favor by proving that his guys weren't prepared to sell.


Those were the good old days...
Caroline

 

[Caroline]

Engineering might swing by a few weeks before a product is ready to ship to ask you what you think about it and what should go into it. If you really know what you're doing you get a lot more integrated into the product planning and design phases, and into the sales process.

I had quite a time with Engineering at that same job... but give me an engineer any day over ill-prepared Salespeople. Engineering, at the very least, knows what it doesn't know...

When I first became a product manager (first in the company) the head of Engineering told me: "We built software before you marketing people got here, and we'll still be building it when you're gone."

He was difficult like that until I delivered my first MRD. After he read it I never had another bit of trouble with him. He committed to a date and product, and delivered on his word. The product development process is a good one when all parties play together well.

Only other trouble I had from this guy was that he stopped talking to me for three days when I resigned, he was that mad at me for "leaving" him.

I took it as a compliment.

Caroline

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Ah caroline...I put something about all sales reps who make their quotas receiving a large box of live badgers as a reward. That document was reviewed by all of the regional sales managers and/or their proxies through repeated iterations until after 3 months one of them called and asked me how long the badger line had been in there...

 

[laurence]

Man, there are a lot of big time movers and shakers on this board....I am humbled.

Computer Security Manager is enough to deal with for me.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Yeah but you can read the bigwhigs emails, right?

If you cant, then you're missing out on the one really big benefit...

 

[laurence]

That got old, plus I started getting afraid of what I would see. One thing I learned is just how little they think of the little guys. I don't mean they think poorly of us, just that we are ants on the sidewalk.

 

[Caroline]

th:

Live badgers? Live BADGERS!!!

I bow to a master -- that is FABULOUS!


Caroline

 

[Nords]

That got old, plus I started getting afraid of what I would see.  One thing I learned is just how little they think of the little guys.  I don't mean they think poorly of us, just that we are ants on the sidewalk. 

You just don't want to be the one to tell the CEO that he really shouldn't be visiting those websites... or handing out his passwords to his "admin assistant"...

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Live badgers it was. I was sending out the set of marketing plans and they were kicking them back a little too quickly saying way too generic stuff like "we'd like to see the document a little thicker" and "it needs just a bit more detailing". In other words, they were opening the attachment, hitting page-down 5 times and then kicking it back into play. So I wanted to see if anyone actually read it.

Word got around, because I'd run into one of the sales vp's about twice a year and every time he saw me he smiled and said "badgers!".

Nords/Laurence...the good emails are the ones where you get two senior managers thoroughly interested in each other. Its especially good when one or both are married. Its extra special good when you dont like one or both of them...

 

[laurence]

How could I forget, my coworker and I were just reminiscing about a guy (no longer working here) who was "fooling around" with two co-workers behind his DW. Both found out about each other, emailing threats, and worse. That incident file was a thick one! People have strange notions of how private email is (as in, not private at all!)

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Indeed. Email was part of my jurisdiction when I was in IT. We very regularly got requests from security to dump somebodies inbox and start an audit track on all emails sent and received for a specific period of time. Any overly large emails were automatically evaluated by one of my staff to make sure they werent schematics or other proprietary information. A lot of email going through the internet gateway in or out of the company was looked at. Anything with more than a couple of recipients was almost always peeked at.

We also tracked through the proxy servers every web site anyone ever went to, what pages were pulled up, page refresh rates, time spent with the browser open to a certain site, etc. Once we were asked by sr. mgt. to pull all of the contractors web activity and compress it to top 50 pages visited, url, a few words describing that pages content, and the time the browser was open and on that page. We found that more than half our contractors were spending more than half their time with very, very non-business pages open. Fired most of them.

I also got regular visits from various management folks who had sent someone an email and had the recipient tell them they never got it. 99% of the time they did get it and I looked to see. After all, if they didnt get it, something was wrong with the email system....right? Usually that didnt go well for them.

 

[laurence]

We presented all the things we "could" track on our email/web browsing to sr. management, and they responded, "well, hmm, we don't want to be the gestapo, we trust our employees."

Only took me three nanoseconds to realize there were bullets of sweat forming on sr. management's forehead.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Oh absolutely...browser tracking of management above a certain level was disabled as a matter of policy.

The reason given for the widespread tracking was to cover our own behinds in the event of a lawsuit. We could clearly show what was or wasnt going on by our audit trails.

For the most part unless there was an employee complaint (email harrassment) or some clear cut idiot (the guy who sent a 28MB video attachment on an email that ended up going to several thousand people in the company and brought the entire email system to a screeching halt for 2 days), the info just sat there. You got in trouble with the boss and they wanted some poop to hang you with though, that tap got opened.

 

[VoyT]

Nords/Laurence...the good emails are the ones where you get two senior managers thoroughly interested in each other.  Its especially good when one or both are married. 

   Heard a story about why a former boss didn't last long at his next job. As the story goes,  he (married) was thorougly interested in a (younger) staffer.  He reportedly wrote  a suggestive email to this new honey -- but sent it to someone else by mistake.  The recipient wasn't amused -- neither was senior management.

 

[JB]

I like the look, but...

I guess it has to hold the boards inside because they put the frickin' antenna top & center of the windshield. And with the rack along the sides instead of athwartships, it'd be impossible to lash down a longboard on the roof anyway!

I use steel Thule crossbars on all my racks, so that shouldn't be a problem. Last time I shopped for a car, I'd check the racks on all the cars that I was interested in. I'd grab the rack and shake the car. There's a big difference between vendors roof racks. Looks like this one is only attached in two places per side.

The antenna is a problem, but the stereo has a 1/8" aux connector -- great idea.