Can one person lead both sales and marketing?

Video Transcription

Can one person successfully be the head of sales and marketing for a growing business? I wanted to address this question because it’s one of the most common challenges faced by small businesses as they build their leadership teams. And it’s a topic that’s come up three times already in conversations this week in different shapes and forms, and comes up very regularly as we meet with CEOs and revenue leaders of small businesses at Authentic. 

Hi, I’m Jennifer Zick. I am the Founder and CEO of Authentic. We’re a fractional Chief Marketing officer firm that serves businesses across the US and sometimes beyond to help them overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step toward healthy growth. And their story is often a similar founder’s story. Many times a very successful earlier stage growth business begins by being founder led and sales driven. And that is a natural sequence of events for a growing business because you don’t really have a business until you’ve proven you can sell something. And often the first generation of selling is experimental until that business finds its true swim lane and go to market fit. And when that happens, it’s really time to amplify that message with strategic marketing. 

But most small businesses will make the mistake at that point of trying to tuck marketing under sales and maintain just one leader for that department because many small businesses simply can’t afford to bring in a senior level leader for every single department as the business matures. That’s really common. But there is a real challenge in assigning marketing under sales. The truth is 99.9% of the time a sales and marketing leader is truly a sales manager. And while they may have some marketing experience in their background, their job and responsibilities are structured and incentivized to keep them focused on nearer term wins. And a strategic marketer’s job is to lay a strong brand foundation that builds value over the long term while strategically executing in the short term. 

They are very different roles and responsibilities and a lot of small businesses struggle by hiring younger earlier stage career marketers and expecting them to report up to sales. And a few things commonly happen in that instance. An earlier stage career marketer without a senior title simply doesn’t have the experience or the authority to push back. And so marketing becomes responsive to whatever the expectations are of the sales leader. And that doesn’t set up the kind of push and pull dynamic that strategically growing businesses really need to balance short term and long term strategy. The other reality is that without a strategic marketing leader who has the been there done that experience, marketing ends up being more of a sales enablement skill set rather than being a demand creation and account expansion and strategic growth arm of the business, which is really where the full customer lifecycle value is found in marketing. 

So what is a small business to do if they can’t afford to have two executives on the team? The answer is find the path to bring the wisdom you need for experienced leaders in both the sales and marketing seats and make them peers to one another so that you get the collaboration of short term near term selling along with long term marketing strategy. And a great solution for this is to bring in a fractional marketing leader. It makes a lot of sense that you probably already have a full time sales leader and the sales team developed in order to build the business you already have and you probably won’t need a full time marketing executive until you’re much larger. 

But you do need the wisdom of “been there, done that” marketing experience to help you on the journey and that’s where Authentic can assist. We bring you the wisdom of true executive marketing leadership on a part time fractional basis so that you can move forward with confidence and true accountability for full strategic marketing from the business vision and the overall go to market strategy all the way through to execution in lockstep with sales. 

So if you’re struggling with where marketing should sit in your organization or how to address the marketing leadership gap, we would love to speak with you. This is a challenge we help businesses with every single day and we love to partner with sales and help you build strong, healthy, sustainable and sales aligned marketing programs and teams. Thanks for tuning in.