Welcome to the Layer Cake
by Craig on Nov.12, 2008, under business
marketing/selling is a “higher” level than building/implementing?
…in reference to my recent blog post.
I wrote that based on my experience (with the quotes thrown in for ironic effect). In the companies that I’ve worked at, the sales & marketing teams had more authority than the implementation teams. Thus, to gain more authority, I should begin to expand outside the implementation realm and into the marketing and sales realm — so my thought went.
Let’s assume for the moment that my observation of the relative power levels was true, and in fact is generally true of most organizations. It’s not necessarily “bad”. Both marketing and implementation are critically important to any business:
- Without implementation, you have nothing to sell, and thus no reason for the business to exist.
- Without marketing, you have no idea what to implement, and thus are at a risk of wasting your capital on implementing the wrong thing.
I’ll even go as far as to argue that marketing should have a priority role over implementation, as they’re the ones that need to set the direction of the business. They’ll set the goals for the implementers.
The problem I had with the businesses I’ve worked in is that the implementation teams were a lot more capable and insightful than the marketing teams. They were able to recognize marketing problems that the marketing team couldn’t. In those situations, the marketing team should have ceded authority to the implementation team. When they didn’t, the business ended up taking bad directions, leading to squandered efforts. Not only is this wasteful, but it’s also frustrating, and led me to a lot of job dissatisfaction.
So, one of my goals is to reverse the process: learn marketing from an implementation point of view and hope that I can result in a net benefit to the organizations I work with. I know I’m not an excellent marketer, but I might be a better one than the marketers are implementers, and I might be able to alleviate some of the friction that occurs between the two factions.
