There is nothing like a recession to get management focused on the role of marketing and its relationship to sales.

Remember when the Internet bubble burst? With budgets tight and sales shrinking, executive attention quickly turned to sales and marketing ROI. This could have created some positive change, as marketing’s relationship to sales results has always been a source of controversy. Unfortunately, the source of the problem wasn’t well understood and companies simply moved the problem around, implementing reorganizations that created as many problems as they resolved.

Now that we have another crisis and renewed focus on an issue that is absolutely essential, let’s consider a solution that attacks the source of the problem. Let’s use this opportunity to create the clear roles and accountabilities that will allow the smart people in every part of the company to become fully engaged and productive.

I’ll start with the good news. It isn’t necessary or even desirable for the go-to-market team to report to a single executive. The go-to-market effort has the best chance to excel when its members have diverse, non-redundant skills. Experience shows that disparate team members reporting to a single manager often struggle to develop or maintain their focus on roles that involve very different skill sets and time horizons.

What, then, unites this team? Existing managers for the departments involved in the go-to-market effort need to align in three respects. First, each part of the team needs to have a clearly defined role in a structured process, eliminating overlaps and gaps in their activities while ensuring continuity with the other members of the team. Second, department managers need to agree on a specific, measurable result that will guide short and long-term decisions about the priorities of the team. And third, the team needs to be measured as a unit, without undue emphasis on the contribution of individuals within the team.

Complexity is a big part of the problem, so let's keep it simple.

There are four basic functions in a go-to-market team. Smaller companies will need to combine these functions among fewer than four people and larger companies will have considerably more than four people on a team. Whenever feasible, specialization in these roles affords the best chance for individual skills development and overall team performance.

1. Inbound marketing managers need to be entirely focused on understanding market problems -- spending enough time with buyers (not just customers) so that the team knows which concerns a market full of buyers deem urgent enough to spend money to resolve. This group should be directly accountable for the quality of the product business case and roadmap.
2. Outbound marketing managers need to be entirely focused on defining a strategy to generate maximum revenue from existing solutions -- understanding how buyers within target segments evaluate and buy this type of product or service. This group should be directly accountable for the quality of the go-to-market plan (larger companies may have specialists performing this same function for different industries, or for solutions in addition to products).
3. Marketing communications needs to be entirely focused on developing the marketing assets (programs, web content and sales tools) that move targeted buyers through the buying process. This group should be directly accountable for the quality of the marketing assets as measured by their impact on the buyer's decision process.
4. Sales needs to be entirely focused on closing individual deals and accountable for the same.
   

If you think Sales is the only part of the go-to-market team that isn't confused about roles, you are mistaken. Many salespeople depend on other members of the go-to-market team to help them close deals. In fact, many companies actively support this role for the people in outbound marketing, hijacking skills and expertise that are essential to the team’s productivity.

Eliminate the distinction between the roles for each member of the go-to-market team and the company won't have time to focus on product quality or build strategies to influence markets full of buyers -- they'll be too busy being sales support people. If Sales needs help to win individual accounts, this role needs to be fulfilled through a sales support organization. By hiding sales support resources and costs in the marketing budget, management has an inflated view of its marketing investment and significantly undercounts the real cost of sales.

The confusion between roles isn’t confined to sales and marketing, however. Development frequently relies on inbound marketing (i.e. product management) for product design or project management roles. This may support the short-term goal to ship the product on time, but it is one of the biggest factors in failed launches. Without the benefit of its inbound marketing member, the go-to-market team must start from scratch to gather the data that allows it to position the product against pervasive, urgent market problems.

It is easy to see when all of the members of a go-to-market team are functioning in their separate but well-integrated roles. The company can launch new products, capture the market share it deserves, enter new segments, capitalize on opportunities from mergers and acquisitions, and get through a market downturn with significantly less stress than its competitors.

The marketing members of a functional go-to-market team know how to gather and act upon deep insight into the goals, attitudes and behaviors of the real people who choose to do business elsewhere. While salespeople focus on prospects who are in the buying process now, the other members of the team are preparing the company to overcome the resistance it will encounter with new deals.

The members of the go-to-market team can work independently while maintaining their focus when they are aligned around real data and a sound strategy. This is best accomplished through two artifacts that should change very infrequently – a buyer persona profile for each of the types of buyers in the buying process and a go-to-market or launch plan that clearly articulates the team’s goals and success metrics plus its messaging and program strategies. When these tools are developed by the team and based on good external data, the team members have the freedom they need to innovate plus the constraints they need to stay focused. Changing their reporting structure will only interfere with their real work.

Adele Revella is the developer of Pragmatic Marketing's Effective Product Marketing seminar. Attended by thousands of product managers and marketers throughout the world, Effective Product Marketing is a roadmap for those who are lost in a list of tactics and want a way out of the madness. She has consolidated more than two decades of relevant experiences into a process that shows marketers how to think like their target audiences, including buyers, customers and sales people.

In the 1990’s Adele served in executive roles at three technology companies, guiding product management, marketing and sales teams to achieve leadership positions in untapped markets. Her market-driven approach was also heavily influenced by her tenure at Regis McKenna, Inc., the PR firm that defined technology marketing during the 80’s, plus five years running her own market research and consulting firm at the end of that decade.

Adele has a particular focus on buyer personas and writes the Buyer Persona blog.