Volume 166: So, I Did A Podcast.

So, I Did A Podcast.

tl;dr: Ever wonder what I look and sound like?

Apologies; this Off Kilter is short and vastly more self-promotional than usual. If you’re a new subscriber and this is your first, don’t worry. It’ll be back to its usual verbose prognosticisms before you know it.

Mostly, I wanted you to know that I’m featured in the latest episode of the “CMO Confidential” podcast, hosted by the irrepressible Mike Linton. The focus is on B2B marketing. So, if you feel so inclined, please take a look, take a listen, and let me know your thoughts.

Unlike many, I’m not a natural self-promoter. I put it down to my Scottishness, so I apologize if I appear at all nervous. I literally hadn’t slept the night before and was so nervous to begin that my hands were shaking! I won’t be listening to it since I can’t handle listening or watching myself, so all feedback is now in your hands.

But, before leaving you to your listening pleasure, I would like to share a thought that’s been percolating for a while that I didn’t have time to cover with Mike, which is that perhaps it’s time we more fundamentally changed the way we execute marketing activities.

As tech marches on, data becomes even newer gold, and AI promises to automate a significant swathe of marketing execution, considerable questions must now be asked not just about what we’re doing but how we organize ourselves to do it.

So, in the interests of transparency, here’s a completely made up by yours truly and utterly data-free opinion for the sake of discussion, if nothing else.

In the B2B landscape, the relationship between sales and marketing is often broken. Sales tend to rule, and, as a result, marketing activities often end up mirroring sales priorities and timeframes. The net result is an incredible focus on short-term tactical sales enablement and not a whole lot else.

You can spot these companies because they tend to lack customer-centricity and a well-differentiated product offering, they tend to lag the category leaders, and the sum-total of their brand-building efforts tends to be a product demo signup form masquerading as a homepage. They tend to suffer from the symptoms of brand weakness, which then creates bad blood, as sales blames marketing for some combo of top-of-funnel weakness, poor lead quality, and a competitor ‘sucking all the oxygen out of the room.’ Only it isn’t really the marketer’s fault, as they’re doing their best with the extremely limited resources and time-bound sales priorities they’ve been given.

So why not hand all of these short-term tactical activities over to sales to manage themselves? Frankly, these are a lot more like sales activities anyway, and this way, you can ensure both complete alignment and no bad blood excuses along the lines of “it’s marketing’s fault.”

So, what do we do with the rest of marketing?

Well, we merge it with strategy as recommended by Roger Martin, of course. Re-shaping marketing as a true 4Ps activity that’s future-focused and strategically valuable to the organization and that, ideally, has board-level reporting responsibility.

This has the side benefit of turning strategy into a demand-centric and customer-driven area of focus rather than a supply-centric, product-driven activity, as is often the case.

Then, we place longer-timeline brand-building under the newly combined strategy/marketing group.

Anyway, I have no idea if it would work. But all the change in the air has got me thinking. And it’s becoming completely apparent that most B2B marketing orgs are pretty fundamentally emasculated by their very, very junior relationship to sales.

And, no. I don’t think sales leaders should be in charge of marketing. Even among the excellent sales leaders I’ve met, vanishingly few are great marketers too. They’re different areas of domain expertise, and the timeframes and resource requirements of each are quite different. No, the marriage of marketing and strategy makes way more sense than the marriage of sales and marketing.