Now, within the context of the marketing and sales relationship, which is where I believe Paul was going, I tend to think of marketing as the function that creates the roadmap (strategy) for the sales team to follow to initiate, qualify and close business (tactical). Indeed, marketing also contributes tactically to the mix by delivering tools to support the journey including, among other things, leads, collateral, events and PR.

Problem is, even though a marketing plan has been vetted and blessed by the sales leadership, in practice, sales is going to do what is familiar and what produces quick results. That’s because the sales function is compensated based upon closing business, any business. Unless you have a sales leader and compensation plan that forces – er, promotes – the team to follow the plan, it won’t fully be carried out.

Hierarchically speaking, strategy should trump tactical. Therefore, sales should roll up under the marketing function. The two-headed sales and marketing executive (a cartoonist would have a field day with this!) is a utopian solution that, in theory, provides a single voice to guide the plan and its implementation.

So yeah, given the marketing and sales juggernaut, the leads stink since both teams are really not singing to the same hymn sheet.

Thanks,
–Dave

As a Product Management professional, I agree with your article, with the exception of the second last sentence.

i.e. [Product Management's] business responsibility is to identify problems in the market and drive the development of products and services to solve those problems.

Product Management is sometimes part of Marketing, sometimes part of Engineering, but I believe it should be a peer level function of those on it’s own.

Having said that, I agree Marketing can be strategic. There are different types of marketing of course: product marketing, brand/corporate marketing, events marketing etc.

Product Marketing is the most strategic of those and has a complementary role with Product Management. But while strategic marketing looks at overall market trends and potential impact on the future of the business, it is product management that focuses on market/customer problems and drives product development.

Saeed