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| Are YOUR Product Marketers
the Anti-Sales Department? We all know that sometimes one part of an organization can seem like it's working against the interests of another. Here's an interesting example I came across recently. It sounds unbelievable, but it's true. A friend of mine is one of a team working on a market research project which will soon be publishing a series of major reports on (let's call them, for the sake of this article) CRM software companies. These will typically cover analysis of all aspects of the publishers and products and will be bought by big ticket users, probably for hundreds of dollars for each copy. Each report is typically based on many days of meetings, and includes inputs from the vendor, one or more marketing analysts, a techie etc. Now as we know, the CRM market has hit a bit of a brick wall recently, and the revenue growth curves for many companies have been mainly flat, or pointing in the wrong direction. So you would think that all these companies would be glad of any independent effort to tell the power users in their industry a bit more about their company. Because the reports are very detailed, vendors have been offered a chance to correct factual errors in the reports before they go to press. Now this is where the anti-sales department comes in, because one of the companies (let's call them the "stealth vendor") has requested that much of the detailed information about their product should be removed. "This is much more information than we normally like customers to know before they buy the product" is a paraphrase of the reasoning behind the request. And the argument goes on that because much of this information was supplied, for the purposes of these reports, but under a non disclosure agreement, they have the right to do so. Well, I'm not the publisher, or even remotely connected to the publisher, but I do know what I would do with a company who asked a report of this kind to be gutted for such a trivial and stupid reason. As you can imagine, the request to pull content for this spurious reason has not created a good atmosphere. What's going to happen next? I don't know. But if you were a sales person in the "stealth vendor" company or a shareholder, you might feel a little bit hacked off with your product marketing people, because if they get their way the influential report on the product you're trying to sell is going to have a lot of blanks in it with a comment saying why... "The software vendor asked us to remove these pages because they don't think customers should know this before they buy the product". is one possible example. Or worse still, the whole attitude of your company and the "need to know" basis for supplying information to your customers could become the main feature of the rewritten report. The implication being that if you treat your customers like idiots, then you will get idiots for customers. So be warned! The anti-sales department is still alive and well and thriving in the 21st century. Some members of this species, hitherto thought to be almost extinct, may be working in a stealth product marketing department near you... Editor's comments:- later... a couple of weeks after writing this article the "stealth vendor" got acquired by another company. It's traditional in such cases (and very desirable in this particular case) for the acquiring company to go in for a new Spring clean of the old marketing department. |
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| Marketing Views | STORAGEsearch | SPARC Product Directory | ACSL - the publisher |
