Whenever I take Marketing to task for wasting time and money, marketing folk try to explain how fundamentally wrongheaded I am. For example, the blogger Jacqueline Barnett, in a comment to my post "Market Requirements = Garbage," complains:

"[Marketing] is a strategic, complex function which defines performance and tactics for achieving the business plan - including product design, pricing decisions, integrated communications to all channels and through all media, and leading and managing distribution and sales strategies and performance."

Similarly, BNET member Slocum fumes:

"Indicating marketing is essentially worthless shows Mr. James lack of knowledge of what marketing's role in a company is/should be. Marketing is more than promotion activity. The function includes competitive positioning and priority setting of activities across the company to ensure the company meets the promise being set forth by the company to the market."

But there's one thing missing from these oh-so-important sounding job descriptions: what's the quantitative measure? Every other department in the modern corporation is measured quantitatively, with that measurement directly tied to their day-to-day activities. By contrast, all the activities that Barnett and Slocum list our are basically un-measurable and thus can't be proven to be useful, useless or irrelevant. And I'm votin' for useless.

For example, how do you measure "defining performance and tactics" - by the number of pages in the interoffice memo? And how do you measure Marketing's contribution to "product design?" By the success of the final product? Even though the features that Marketing requested were impossible to implement? How do you measure the impact of "integrated communications"? And "priority setting of activities" and "ensuring the company meets the promise"? All unmeasurable fluff.

As I've repeatedly blogged, Marketing should be goaled and compensated on one thing: generating qualified leads. If generating qualified leads were the gold standard for measuring Marketing, the activities that Barnett and Slocum slapped onto their list would fall by the wayside, because they're really just impressive-sounding biz-blab and buzzwords.

More importantly, such comments often reveal a profound disrespect for sales professionals. Check out this comment BNET member Tony Wanless:

"Marketing has to figure out generally what the target customers' biggest problems are, and sales has to go in and explain how the product or service will fix that problem and provide value to the customer. That means, of course, the sales people have to help prospects identify their individual problems. But too many sales people just go in and browbeat the prospect with the features of their "solution", without ever listening to the customer in order to identify what the problem is."

Yeah, that's right. Sales people are all about browbeating customers. Except for the fact (which Tony would know if he'd ever been on a sales call) that browbeating rarely worked even back in the day, and it's now completely ineffective in today's highly consultative selling environments. There a word for sales reps who browbeat. That word is "unemployed."

Hilariously, Wanless's thinks that Marketing is going to figure out what customers really want, and then tell Sales. He's got it exactly backwards. Marketing needs to go to Sales, find out what customers need, and then find prospects that match those needs. Most Marketing folk have absolutely no selling experience, so consequently their opinions on customer needs are consistently worthless.

As I pointed out in my post "Sales is Essential - Marketing is Not", talking about selling with your typical marketer is like discussing intercourse with a celibate priest. The conversation tends to be embarrassing rather than enlightening.