How to Use Target Marketing to Deliver the Right Message

Conflicts between the sales team and the marketing team are endemic but not inevitable, according to Bob Schmonsees, a principal at RJS Associates and a leading authority on marketing and sales alignment.

Schmonsees believes that a great deal of marketing activity is useless because marketing groups tend to focus on what he calls "broadcast messaging" that’s intended to reach as large an audience as possible. This traditional approach to marketing is an artifact of the days of mass manufacturing, where marketing’s main challenge was to make as many people as possible aware of a firm’s products, in order to make it easier for the sales rep to sell.

Unfortunately, selling software today is less a matter of selling a product than of selling a solution. This is a difficult concept for traditional marketing professionals to understand, which is why you see so much product-oriented marketing where the product or service (or combination of both) has simply been relabeled as a "solution." However, a solution is not a repackaged collection of products and services, but a change in the way an individual customer conducts business. When you’re selling solutions, you’re primarily selling the CHANGE, and only secondarily selling the products and services that helped enable that change.

In other words, solution selling is a completely different way of thinking about sales, which is why product-oriented messages, intended for broadcast to a wide audience, are completely ineffective. Selling solutions requires a "narrowcast" message that’s intended to appeal to a small, highly targeted audience. This narrowcast message must be built around a limited set of customer problems, rather than upon a broad set of product features and functions. In general, narrowcast messages should be industry-specific and even industry sector-specific. A narrowcast message should also be targeted at companies of a particular size, because the basic business concerns of startups, SMEs and large enterprises are usually quite different. In other words, the more specifically targeted the message, the more likely it is to be helpful in the solution-selling process.

Regrettably, most companies end up paying the overhead of being what Schmonsees calls "bilingual" – with marketing talking one language (broadcasting about the product) and sales talking another (narrowcasting about a solution). The challenge is to wean the marketing group away from thinking in terms of broadcast messaging and get them to focus instead upon narrowcast messaging that can actually support the solution-selling process. But that’s difficult for three reasons:

1. MBA programs typically provide case studies and training in broadcast-oriented marketing methods, since these are relatively easy to teach to a broad range of students who are working or intend to work in a broad range of industries. In other words, solution selling is too unique and situational to be taught in a classroom.

2. In most software companies marketing is subservient to engineering, either organizationally or culturally (i.e., filled with ex-programmers and would-be programmers). Because programmers create blocks of code (i.e., software products) that they want lots of people to use, programmers tend to push marketing groups to market those blocks of code rather than what those blocks of code might do for a customer.

3. Broadcast messaging is less work than narrowcast messaging because the marketing group merely creates one set of marketing tools for everyone, rather than a customized set of marketing tools for each targeted industry sector. Furthermore, broadcast messaging lends itself well to easilywritten but vague buzzwords and generalities, such as "improves productivity" or "state-of-the-art" which sound important to marketing ears, but mean nothing to actual customers.

In order to overcome these difficulties, management inside software firms must take the following steps:

1. Put sales and marketing under the same management and make it separate from engineering.
2. Create a template of marketing collateral that supports solution selling by addressing four to five business problems in a particular industry sector.
3. Tie the marketing group’s compensation to their ability to create similar narrowcast marketing materials.

The advantage of this approach is that it frees the sales reps from the burden of creating their own narrowcast sales tools, thereby giving them more time to actually sell.