• by Tig Tillinghast , June 14, 2002

It might not be considered polite to bring up within a company, but the sales department has traditionally wielded much more influence than that of the marketing department. And this might be changing, as the marketing folks increasingly become the gatekeepers for individual customer relationships.

The fact that salespeople wielded more say in a firm may partially be due to the fact that many companies are run by people who came up through the sales group. People in product management and other roles tend to rise to the CEO level less often. Even the inventors of products and companies usually get shifted over to a non-executive position sometime around the time a company gets big enough to go public.

The matter of internal corporate influence is a subtle one, hinging on seemingly minor memos and hallway conversations. “How does our biggest client like our new product?” a sales guy might be asked. “They say they’d like it five times more if customer service does X, or if product development worked on Y.”

Thus, a salesperson helps define the product development and other major strategic decisions.

An axiom taught to me by my old boss, Rishad Tobaccowala, is that those with the client contact control the company. (Actually, he said those with client contact always get paid more, but my version is respectful enough of the original intent.)

And it is precisely that client contact balance that has been shifting toward the marketing group in the past three or four years, as e-commerce becomes a more important element for many companies. Marketing now has client contact.

In traditional media, we’d most often send messages out the door and seldom bother to determine just how the market perceived them. I think this was partly an expense and effort issue, but also that the marketing people feared spending huge amounts of money only to prove themselves ineffective. It was much nicer just to assume that our advertising was doing a great job.

In the online world, we have no such luxury. There’s no hiding, but at least the online marketers can take solace that when they do things right, they often wield wide-ranging influence over the organization.

“How do our top 20 clients like our new product?” the CEO might ask. “They love it,” a an online marketing person may respond, “But they think the sales department is a bunch of jerks. Look, here’s an email about it.”

The Age-Old Conflict

Sales and marketing have a long history of not getting along. It makes sense that there would be friction, with both groups often having overlapping responsibilities. Both groups would like to take credit for successes and find it very convenient to blame the other for failures.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking to a lot of in-house buyers across the country, and in our wandering conversations, it’s been striking to me how often they’ve been bringing anecdotal customer opinions to the attention of their management.

The new tradition of adapting online marketing to its customer reception is expanding to include customer opinion on product, sales, pricing and other issues.

If senior managers want to know what’s going on in the marketplace, they’re just as likely to call up the person monitoring minute-to-minute online feedback as much as they are likely to call up a sales guy.

This may be the beginning of a process that brings the status of the online marketers to a par with not only their traditional media counterparts, but also with other, more consulted parts of the company.