I interviewed with a company last week. This company has been in business for more than 6 years and has never made a profit. They have taken down over $16million in VC funding and have a relatively short runway left. They have a service that the customers they have like but they are not able to generate quality leads to increase customer base.
They just recently made some major management changes to get a focus on sales and marketing. Over the past many years they targeted one market after another without lasting success. The interesting thing is they never took the time to evaluate what their value proposition is, what the roadblocks to adoption are, what the key messaging needs to be, what target segments exist and how they differ and where they should focus their efforts for success. This is 6 years and millions of dollars after the fact.
If you ever wondered about when to bring in marketing or what the value of marketing is, let this be a lesson. Management firmly believes that the company has a solid product and that the lack of focus on marketing has been the major impairment. You might wonder how people could be so naive as to go for 6 years without seeing the light. I assure you, however, that these folks are more typical than you might like to think.
Most start up companies think that marketing is the process of creating web copy, banner ads, seo, trade shows, and blogs. They think they don’t need it until the product is complete and the company has cycled through a number of beta customers. Then once they have done that they think that their product is great and all they need is a mid-level marcom manager (in spite of the fact that they call them the VP of Marketing) to crank out the web copy and they will be off and running.
Let me tell you that you better sit back, think hard and re-evaluate, because marketing != marcom. Marketing is an art and a discipline that drives business planning, product development, company positioning and messaging, sales channel development, and a host of other things. It is the front end of your success funnel in spite of the fact that it is often the last piece considered. All I can say is the company that thinks they don’t need marketing until the product is up and out into the market, doesn’t understand marketing.
