Why Marketing Won't Listen

Check out the "Catching Flack" post Bad Marketing Follows Bad Sales. In it, BNET's new PR blogger Travis Van blames Sales for not doing a good enough job communicating with Marketing about the characteristics of qualified leads. With all due respect, the problem isn't Sales, it's that most B2B Marketing groups have a vocabulary that makes meaningful communication almost impossible.

Here's an example from real life. The software giant Oracle has a crack Sales organization, famous for hard-driving executives who cut big-money deals with major corporations. In fact, Oracle is arguably the ultimate B2B software firm because, unlike arch-rival Microsoft, Oracle doesn't sell retail products to consumers. Furthermore, Oracle is the market share leader in CRM software, which is bought primarily by sales executives. So if there's any company on the face of the earth that understands Sales - both from the selling end and the buying end - it would have to be Oracle, right?

Well, Oracle may have one of the best Sales organizations on earth, but its Marketing organization lives on Bizarro World. To show you what I mean, try reading this honest-to-god press release that just came out from Oracle Marketing:

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. 16-JUL-2007 05:05 AM Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle(r) Communications Order and Service Management (Oracle Communications OSM) Release 6.2, which extends Oracle's Siebel CRM capabilities with comprehensive order management functionality to automate fulfillment requests for traditional and next-generation services. Complementing existing Siebel CRM order capture and processing functionality, Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (previously Oracle Communications Provisioning) is a next-generation solution that helps communications service providers streamline and automate their complex order management processes. Oracle Communications OSM enables service providers to rapidly introduce new, emerging services, as well as cost effectively scale the delivery of mass-market services through fully automated order management - all on one convergent platform for current and next-generation services and technologies...Oracle Communications OSM complements Oracle's Siebel CRM functionality to provide: open, standards-based Web services integration enabling automated end-to-end business processes; order transformation, decomposition, coordination and dynamic execution of increasingly convergent communications orders, helping to reduce errors, decrease order-delivery times and improve scalability through automation; intelligent Change Management to inherently analyze the net effect of order changes resulting from supplemental, cancellation or exception processing to automatically execute the appropriate compensation steps - enabling significantly reduced manual intervention and associated costs; rapid, flexible application integration through intuitive run-time Web GUI integration allowing users to select, reserve and update information in external systems, which then dynamically determines order processing.

I can only imagine what an Oracle sales pro, with years of experience selling CRM, must think when he tries to talk some reality into whoever wrote that press release. An exercise in futility, no doubt, because a mind that's capable of writing such arrant gobbledegook wouldn't know a customer need if it jumped out of his pocket and bit him in the ass. Now remember: Oracle is a fabulously successful company that's chockablock with incredibly talented Sales executives. If Oracle Marketing can be this lousy, how likely it is that Marketing in some vanilla B2B firm is going to be much better?

So I hate to burst Van's bubble, but until every marketing geek working in a company that depends upon direct B2B sales is forced to spend at least a year selling -- and fired if he or she fails to perform -- Marketing will remain (best case) useless overhead and (worst case) a major embarrassment. In short, Sales can't explain customers to Marketing, because Marketing is too choked by their own smoke to understand what Sales is trying to tell them.

In my next post, I'll comment on Van's opinion that sales reps are illiterate liars.