Look at any job description for a product marketing or marketing communications role, and I guarantee you’ll see a bullet point like this under “responsibilities”:
Gather input from a variety of sources—customers, industry analysts, media, competitors, and salespeople—and create powerful sales tools that communicate value and differentiation.
Often these marketers (and those who write their job descriptions) spend too much time trying to “communicate value and differentiation” and don’t see what salespeople really want to know - what other salespeople are using and doing to win deals.
No matter how much time marketers and product managers spend with salespeople and customers, they just don’t see enough of what happens at the moments of truth—the points in time at which the buyers are receiving and responding to the messages the sales team delivers. Look how fast the competitive landscape, the needs of the marketplace, and the product portfolios change. A top-down approach will never keep up.
So salespeople spend way too much time creating their own materials and rarely reach out to marketing unless they want that new product data sheet or more company-branded tchotchkes they can give to customers.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that they ignore 90% of the “stuff” that the folks in corporate give them.
OLD RULE: The folks in corporate know best what the sales people need in the field.
NEW RULE: The most effective selling content, messages, and strategies are discovered from experience with buyers.
Being a marketing professional myself, I know that this is the hardest mindset shift for marketers to make, and I wish I had accepted this reality much earlier in my career. If you are a marketer, don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault. We’ve been classically trained to work this way. If you are in sales, send this to your marketing folks.
