My views on marketing and sales were shaped by my father, no doubt on that one. While, we had our differences, there was no doubt that he was a great sales person with a full understanding of marketing and having it in his blood. My views on selling were based on him and will be until the day I die.
My father wasn’t the only person I’ve seen like this. Early on in my career, we had a Novell
marketing person that we dealt with. While
she was a marketing person, she was also a connector, could get answers, and
take feedback. I felt like my feedback
at least went in one ear. Whether it had any effect didn’t really matter. I dealt with her and she with me. We had a company team from Compaq that we dealt with as
well Dina Vasil and Roy Peek. While I’m
not sure about how they felt about me, I felt that they took feedback back, and
I respected them.
I was a member of a vendor program for the first half of my
professional career. It wasn’t a program
that you pay to be a member of, the vendor will notice you and ask you to be a
member. I felt honored to be asked to
join. Thru that vendor program, I was
asked to provide feedback to product groups and discussion both positive and
negative. I was specifically told I
wasn’t expected to just say positive things, but was told that they wanted to
hear the negative things as well. They
felt it was the best way for them to grow and improve their products. Having worked for startups, I could
immediately see the importance of what they said. It made me feel aligned with them that my
feedback mattered. “Tell me what my
products need to do, or do better” is a great way to market to the technology
crowd.
Unfortunately, I found about 5-6 years into this journey
that things change. The vendor program
became much less about making products better.
The vendor program became about using the people in it as unpaid
marketing. It became clear that they
viewed my job as uncompensated marketing person for them as my feedback was no
longer wanted. I was also now expected
to go purchase their products if I wanted to write any subject on them. Given my upbringing, the whiplash was not
something I could accept or stomach.
I say the above not to beat on this famous vendor or
marketing folks in general. At some
level, we must all do marketing. I say
the above to talk about my view of marketing and the impedance mismatch of
marketing and engineers. Unfortunately,
the impedance mismatch has become a bit too much.
There is a rather crude parabole that I think is appropriate
for people to know and understand. I
learned this when I worked at Coca-Cola for Ed Brown. Ed didn’t say it this way, but roughly, it
was the story of a bird flying south too late in the season. On a frozen morning, the bird freezes up and
falls into the cow pasture near some cows.
While laying their unable to move, a nearby cow defecates on the bird. This keeps the bird from freezing. Unfortunately, a cat sees the commotion. As the frozen bird realizes it is actually
warmed up, the cat comes over, grabs the bird, and kills it. The moral of the story being that not
everyone that shits on you is your enemy and that not everyone that gets you
out of shit is your friend. The point Ed was making was that he wasn't there to beat on anyone. He was honestly trying to help. He wanted to figure out if something made sense for Coca-Cola. He was going to give you complete feedback.
Marketing is, and I suspect has always been, about pushing a
message out. Today, marketing is a one
way mechanism, that if you don’t get the response you want, move onto another
person and to hell with any feedback. The
problem with this being that you can actually learn from your failures and the
people that disagree with you. Product
groups need feedback and that feedback can come from many places.
Unfortunately, marketing folks don’t really know or
understand how to take feedback. They think that people are either for them or
against them. They don’t seem to
understand how to win people over on a personal level. Here is an example where a Microsoft
representative failed without understand that I was testing him. A msft rep was bemoaning the fact that people
don’t just accept and fall over for whatever msft is pushing, yes, it was that
bad. I listed out to Sam, not his real
name, 4-5 issues that I saw that had
nothing to do products at msft, but had to do with policy. Some were old, some new, and some were about
what I continued to see. I hoped he
would take them as feedback. No, he
wanted to argue the points. That wasn’t my goal. I wanted to see what he would do with the
feedback and he did not pass. That’s not
a condemnation of Sam. I don’t know him,
I just know of him as I think I just met him once. What it did do was it reminded me how much
marketing people have a problem with feedback that they don’t like.
I tell the story about Sam to really bring out a larger point, marketing people don’t know how to take feedback. They need to become more flexible and at least act like they are interested in feedback positive or negative. I told the story about Sam because it is fresh in my mind. It also showed how marketing people are a one way conduit. Rarely do you have a successful one way conduit.
This isn’t a problem limited to Microsoft. I see this across the board. I see that at other places much closer to home and it is much more intense.
