Question by gaga_chick: What is the role of a marketing manager of a software company selling software to an industrial machinery co.?
The marketing manager isn’t doing the selling alone- with him is a sales rep and a sales manager and the 3 of us share of goal that this industrial machinery company (the people who would show include the buyer, jr engineer and production manager) will buy our software. So what does marketing manager do specifically in this kind of situation?
Thanks a million!
Best answer:
Answer by Bill the marketing dude
I suggest you use the “funnel model” of sales – view the sales process as a funnel, with all the possible customers for your product coming in the top and the customers who actually buy your product coming out the bottom.
Using this model, the separation of the jobs becomes more obvious.
The job of marketing is to feed the top of the funnel – to attract as many customers as possible to come and get information about the product. You want to attract customers that are as close as possible to the “ideal” (i.e. the most likely to buy), so you want to work closely with the sales folks to determine what that “ideal” customer looks like. You may want to invite the engineering folks to that discussion; they almost certainly designed the product to solve a particular problem, and that may inform who that “ideal” customer is.
The job of the sales manager, then, is to ensure that those customers coming into the top of the funnel are qualified (i.e. confirmed as viable customers so the sales rep isn’t wasting time talking to folks who aren’t even interested in what you’re selling or have no ability to buy) and distributing those now-qualified sales leads to the sales reps for closure.
It’s useful for the marketing manager to spend time in the field with the sales rep to better understand the sales process and the customer perspective on the product – it can lead to sharpening of the marketing messages, which brings more and better-qualified prospects into the top of the funnel, which reduces the cost of qualifying and selling the. However, the marketing person should not be involved in closing the sale – my experience is that closing is an art form that should be left to those who do it for a living. The only role for the marketing person is, when requested, to be the “voice of headquarters” to come into the account and have a meeting with the appropriate people, listen to their concerns and answer questions. The real purpose here is just to make the customer feel important by bringing someone from headquarters in for the meeting; it has almost nothing to do with actually making the customer more comfortable with the product (although you’d better have the answers when you get there!!!)
I hope this helps!
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