I spend a lot of my time trying to explain to people why Marketing is important. So it was somewhat disconcerting when a friend of mine exclaimed over lunch, “Maybe we should just do away with Marketing!”
It was going to be a long lunch…
We had been discussing why e-commerce initiatives so often seem to yield poor results. I had been relating a positive experience I’d recently had buying a camera from a really good e-commerce website and was wondering why all e-stores weren’t like that. I had concluded that this site must have been designed by marketers who cared about customer experience rather than IT-types who were more interested in ease of implementation.
In fact, my friend didn’t have it in for the function of marketing itself, just the artificial barriers we create between groups of people in an organization. Maybe if the marketing people and the IT people working together on an e-commerce project felt like they were part of the same team, with the same objectives, then the outcome would be better.
“What I mean”, he continued, “Is that we shouldn’t think of Marketing as just a ‘department’. Since many people are involved, we should just get them all together and call it something else that’s more meaningful.”
“How about ‘Revenue Enablement’?, I offered. That seemed to work for him.
Then I got thinking. What if you renamed the Sales and Marketing departments in your company “Revenue Enablement”? It might just help align priorities, focus efforts, and result in greater cooperation. You see, when you talk about what you deliver (revenue) rather than what you do (marketing and sales) there is a constant reminder of the real purpose of your work.
Think it’s kind of a wacky idea? Obviously it mustn’t be just lip-service but perhaps the renaming of the function could be a first step towards a better overall go to market model. After all, how many organizations do you know that have renamed their “Technical Support” groups “Customer Service”?
This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.