Customer Facing Marketing

All sales are emotional at some level. Marketing's outward facing job is to create an impression in the customer base that supports the strategy and positioning of the company and its products. Sales guys are the infantry who storm the hillsides; they invest themselves in one on one situations with the target and overcome by force of numbers, training and equipment. However, no commander would send his troops into harm's way without softening up the defense with a little artillery. Marketing is the artillery of business. Whether the message is delivered with a PR approach or paid advertising and whether the media is print, online, trade-shows/conferences or word of mouth, the goal is to create an environment in which the sales guys find the customer emotionally prepared to buy his products.

Taking the military analogy a little further, Marketing is also reconnaissance and intelligence. Marketing needs to identify target accounts and generate leads that the sales guys can follow. Marketing is also charged with gathering competitive information and interpreting this data for the corporation as tactical sales data or as features requirements for future product versions. 

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Inward Facing Marketing

In most small companies, Marketing is also responsible for product planning and product management. I have found that during the product planning phase it's more difficult to know which features to leave out of a new project than it is to dream up features that should be included. I believe that having an agreed-upon development procedure that includes formal documents and formal reviews can really help companies to make good choices. The amount of formality and paperwork may vary according to the corporate culture and life phase, but at the minimum, Marketing should produce an MRD (Marketing Requirements Document) that outlines the features expected in the product, the target market and the target timeframe. The R&D team should respond with a written specification document that is iterated between R&D, Marketing and other stakeholders until consensus is achieved. At this point, the specification should be frozen and it should be difficult (but not impossible) for features to be added or removed.

The key here is to generate a consensus. Voting, autocracy and bullying also work, short term, but my experience is that it's worth taking the time to build agreement from all stakeholders so that everyone feels a strong degree of ownership for the results of the development cycle.