Why Software Marketers Get No Respect
I feel slow on the take on this one, but it has only been in the past year that I have begun to realize that most marketing departments are low man on the todem pole in software companies. Here's my theory...
Two groups drive the initial success of most software companies: sales and engineering. This make sense. Afterall, you have to produce a good product and you have to be able to sell it. Otherwise, you're out of business.
The marketing department often comes aboard as sort of an afterthought. Unless they come from a marketing background, founders often view marketing as little more than brochures and advertising and, even worse, are clueless about measurement. So their respect for the value that marketing brings to the table is downplayed.
This in turn makes it difficult to hire the good marketers because they'd rather work for consumer goods companies where they do get respect. So software companies end up hiring people that don't really understand the importance of marketing either and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low expectations result in poor results.
How to fix this? A topic for a future post...
Two groups drive the initial success of most software companies: sales and engineering. This make sense. Afterall, you have to produce a good product and you have to be able to sell it. Otherwise, you're out of business.
The marketing department often comes aboard as sort of an afterthought. Unless they come from a marketing background, founders often view marketing as little more than brochures and advertising and, even worse, are clueless about measurement. So their respect for the value that marketing brings to the table is downplayed.
This in turn makes it difficult to hire the good marketers because they'd rather work for consumer goods companies where they do get respect. So software companies end up hiring people that don't really understand the importance of marketing either and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low expectations result in poor results.
How to fix this? A topic for a future post...
1 Comments:
Interesting perspective, and one I agree with. I’ve been in the software industry of over 25 years and my consulting company Focus Marketing, (www.focus-market.com) specializes in helping companies with exactly that problem. Your premise about the relative importance of engineering and sales in software companies, especially the small ones, is right on. In my experience, what tends to happen is that someone creates a software product, based on their previous experience, and then tries to sell the product and needs some supporting material. This process typically starts with a website, PowerPoint, and a few brochures. As the creators of the product are the ones selling in the early days, the marketing material reflects the functionality and capabilities of the product. Most of the ones I’ve seen are devoid of any understanding of their target market, business issues, and potential benefits.
The next stage of development is usually the owners realize that they need to get hire a “professional” software sales person. An oxymoron? (Sorry, couldn’t resist the dig!) The sales person needs to reach a sales target, and therefore is focused on lead generation, and the more tactically aspects of marketing, such as telemarketing, trade shows, direct mail, email campaigns etc.
In both of these scenarios, the engineering or owner led and sales led, the focus of marketing is purely on lead generation, with little emphasis on the strategic aspects. I have found that by investing a small amount of time and resources into the strategic aspects, such as target market definition, segmentation, positioning, messaging, competitive analysis, etc., makes the creation of tactical marketing material so much easier and far more effective. Lastly, using all of these tactics and materials in a coordinated fashion by creating integrated campaigns focused on the target market, i.e. a marketing plan, will bring greater returns that one-shot efforts aimed at boosting a drop-off in leads.
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