The marketing that starts at the sale
The difference between doing marketing from the business side and doing it from the communication side is not a matter of style. It is a matter of results.
There is a question I always ask in the first meeting, and it almost never gets a quick answer: how much of what you sold last month came from marketing?
I am not asking about reach. I am not asking about engagement. I am asking about sales.
The discomfort that question creates is, in itself, the diagnosis.
Two ways into the same problem
Someone who comes from communication starts with the message. What we say, how we say it, in what tone, in which asset. That is a good starting point when the brand is what is broken.
Someone who comes from the business starts somewhere else: what is sold, to whom, at what margin, through which channel, and at exactly which point in the process it falls apart. Only after that does the conversation about the message appear.
Both ways produce campaigns. Only one of them produces campaigns you can defend in front of a commercial director.
What changes when you sit in the commercial committee
For almost four years I sat in the weekly commercial meeting of a multi-brand automotive group. Sales and stock were reviewed, brand by brand. There is no room there to present a beautiful campaign: you have to explain why this brand is not turning over, what is happening with the model that has been sitting in the yard for three months, and what marketing is going to do about it this week.
That routine changes how you think. You start looking at inventory before looking at the content calendar. You start moving budget between brands within the month, not within the year. You start killing campaigns that were performing on mid-funnel metrics and not on closing.
And you start to understand something uncomfortable: a good share of any company's marketing budget is buying volume that does not convert.
Reducing investment is not cutting
When someone says they reduced marketing investment, the first assumption is that they cut. That they did less.
That is not what happens. What happens is that you review, channel by channel, which one is bringing contacts that actually close, which one is bringing volume that gets lost along the way, and you cut the second group. Demand does not fall, because what you cut was not generating demand: it was generating activity.
That can only be done if you have access to the sales data. And that is the point underneath: a marketing team with no visibility of the close cannot optimise, it can only spend.
What I would do first
If I had to put a company's marketing in order tomorrow, I would start with three things, in this order:
- Connect marketing to the sales data. By hand if necessary, in a spreadsheet if that is what there is. Without that, everything else is opinion.
- Find the leak points in the funnel. Almost always the problem is not in acquisition, it is in what happens afterwards.
- Only then review the message. Because a good message on top of a broken process only makes it break faster.
The most expensive marketing there is, is the kind that looks good and cannot be measured against anything.