Page 29 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

Marketing Is Not a Department

A Twin Cities business-to-business company has excellent service, strong
salespeople, award-winning sales collateral, and a problem: The company
believes that sales and marketing are for the sales and marketing people.

As a result, that company is carrying an enormous marketing liability. Their
CFO is negligent, unresponsive, and rude. People who deal with the CFO have a
tainted view of the company, even though the CFO is the only bad apple they’ve
tasted there.

The CFO cost his company over $50,000 in business last year just from one
source of referrals:

Me.
The president of Seasonal Concepts, Albert Schneider, stresses how fragile a
service business is: “We can have great talent, products, prices, and advertising.
But if that sales clerk at the end of the line fails, everything fails. The buyer
doesn’t return. And if the buyer suffers a very bad experience, he tells all his
friends not to come, either.”
Everyone in your company is responsible for marketing your company.
Every failure is likely to be costly.
More than half of all Japanese companies do not even bother to have
marketing departments, because they believe that everyone in the company is
part of the marketing.
Marketing is not a department. It is your business.

Marketing Myopia

Most executives are too busy ducking falling trees to see the forest.
Tunnel vision became so common that Theodore Levitt coined a now-famous

term for it: Marketing Myopia.
It is the inability of people to see the broad scope of their businesses.
My friend Geoffrey Moore, who advises high-tech companies and wrote

Crossing the Chasm and Inside the To rnado, cleverly describes this myopia
when he describes working with Silicon Valley companies: “You walk into the
president’s office, and chat. When you leave, you notice his fly is down. You say