Prospecting is a marketing function

Bald Dog has a very good understanding of the management deficiencies and self-defeating strategies of most sales managers.

The other prevalent type of sales manager is the one that was always an average producer, but is very detail oriented, never slipped up on paperwork and always followed company policy to the letter. They also tend to be sycophants that kiss-up to top management.

Does this mean that you think companies send salespeople out on the whole to "dig randomly"?

Brilliant point, Jacques. I totally missed this baby. Most probably high-performing salespeople have no interest in becoming sales managers anyway. They love what they do with passion. Hence they are good at it.

Mediocre salespeople can do a bit of brown-nosing and then they can step up and get into the sales manager’s chair, where they can bark their orders from.

I think they are far too busy doing quarterly survival and creating a flimsy veneer to pull over the eyes of Wall Street. And while the analysts are admiring the photograph, no one looks at the X-ray that clearly shows the raging cancer? So, the company survives one more quarter and keeps struggling to survive the next one.

This may sound like a cynical view, but maybe there is a touch of reality in it too.

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Without making it a general statement, I do.

More often than not, there is not enough collaboration between sales and marketing. Marketing people are busy creating cute slogans and images, while salespeople are responsible for making enough money, so the marketing people can be paid to create even more cute slogans and silly images in the name of brand.

And when salespeople go out to make it all happen, they rely on their own self-learnt skills and hardly ever use the retarded "brand awareness" stuff created by the marketing folks.

And then the CEO says to the salesperson, “This is your quota and off you go to bring it in.” Then he turns to the marketing guy, “Jack, let’s have a cup of coffee and look at those new catchy slogans you’ve just created.”

And at the end of the month the sales guy will be beaten up for coming 10% short on his quota, but the marketing guy will be praised for his exceptional creativity. The sales guy gets beaten up for bringing in only 90,000 instead of the expected $100,000, but the marketing guy will be praised for something that didn’t bring in one single penny.

This is what I find rather sad.

Thoughts?

Where do you usually see something like this? Fortune 50, Small Business, ???

I think it starts among the F50 and then lots of small businesses imitate them. For instance, how many small businesses imitate the image advertising of big known companies? A lot. That's the sad part.

Marketing rarely uses a message that resonates with future buyers. Instead of going to the source (current customers) and asking them 'Why did you buy our product'? they spend thousands of dollars on slogans that brings a lot of inquiries , but few qulaified leads.

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Spot on, Susan.

One of the marketing functions that is prevalent in companies of all sizes is "lead development." Marketing management's performance is being held accountable for that function now, more than ever before. However, that doe not necessarily mean that they are generally doing the job more effectively.

There is often a big loophole that they can slip through. Who can identify that loophole?

Are you talking about copycats?