I've noticed a trend that seems to be getting worse with the current economy: as marketers, we've become control freaks. Let me explain what I mean by giving you a few examples of what I've observed recently:
- A lot of marketers are creating sales materials and promotional flyers without asking for feedback from their sales force. Is this because they want all the glory for themselves?
- Several marketers who send email or direct mail campaigns want these communications to come from their marketing department instead of sending them on behalf of each salesperson. This gives them more control over the leads, but are there other motives?
- Most marketers don't have a blog for their website, but they still won't allow the sales team to create their own blog. Are they afraid of a little competition?
I don't want it to look like I'm beating up on marketers, especially since I'm one of them. I think there's a lot of pressure for us to show our value inside the organization and that has turned some of us into control freaks. And when this happens, the salespeople start to hate us.
So what is the solution? It's not as simple as just telling our fellow marketers to give up control and play nice in the sandbox with the sales force. Can we let salespeople run their own email campaigns? Yes, as long as we help them create the messaging. Should we ask the sales managers to help us design lead generation programs? Absolutely.
As marketers, our ultimate goal is to drive revenue for the organization. By giving up a bit of control and allowing more collaboration, I believe we'll be able to produce better results. But that's just my opinion--what are your thoughts?
