The Product Marketing Reporting Structure Dilemma

Where should product marketing report into within a technology organization? Marketing? Business Units? Product Management? The CEO? IDC's 2008 Tech Marketing Benchmarks study indicated that product marketing reports directly into marketing at approximately 45% of technology companies. This is by no means a clear trend to be replicated by every company. In fact, based upon years of research at IDC in this area as well as my own experience in the product marketing function, I continue to believe that the correct answer for product marketing's reporting structure is. . . . it depends. Yes, this may seem like a cop-out initially, but there really is some support for my opinion here.

The first question to consider is what is your definition of product marketing? IDC's official definition is as follows:

• Marketing professionals accountable for developing and executing the strategy to increase market share for specific products. Activities include market sizing and opportunity assessment, proposing future product development, developing market requirements documents (MRDs), crafting key product messages, conducting competitive analyses, and determining pricing, packaging and program offerings. (this category does not include product management, industry marketing or solution marketing) - refer to IDC's Sales and Marketing Taxonomy

Regardless of your reporting structure, your first step needs to be the definition of this role within the organization including how this role will interact with other parts of the company. (i.e., roles, responsibilities, performance measurement strategy) Many companies have overlapping responsibilities between product management and product marketing depending upon the business unit or individuals' skill-sets. Combining these two roles is also quite common.

So back to the reporting structure dilemma. Not only have I seen product marketing report into different parts of an organization, but I've seen it oscillate within the same company between marketing and the business units every couple of years. Regardless of what has happened historically in your company, product marketing should report into the part of the organization where the greatest misalignment exists today as well as where the greatest opportunities for improvement exist. (assuming these areas of misalignment cannot be fixed more easily from a process or tactics perspective)

For example, Citrix, a company recently cited in the Leadership Quadrant of IDC's 2009 Marketing Performance Matrix, shifted product marketing's reporting structure from the CMO (Wes Wasson) to the business units in early 2009. Wes described it as follows: "we occasionally shift the hard line reporting of field and product groups, depending upon where we most need to optimize". Another factor to consider is who owns the budget. Wes and his team decided to keep the budget within his control. The result is a strong sense of balance between control of staff and related processes (by the business units) and control of the budget (by the CMO/marketing).

What is your product marketing reporting structure and who owns your product marketing budget? Please share your thoughts below or feel free to contact me directly at mgerard@idc.com.

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IDC's Sales Enablement Framework

Sales enablement continues to be an area of opportunity for marketers to improve their credibility in the organization and their impact on the bottom line. IDC defines Sales enablement (SE) as: "The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place. . . to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward."

I'd like to invite Rich Vancil, VP of IDC's Executive Advisory Group, to share with you the sales enablement framework that our team (Rich Vancil, Lee Levitt, Seth Fishbein and me) has developed:

"Thanks Michael.

Sales people are knowledge workers and their preparation time is all about building their knowledge so that they can have the most effective interactions with their customers. We like to refer to these interactions as 'conversations'. A sales-person's conversations can be actual or virtual; written or oral; one-way or interactive; one-dimensional or multi-media. IDC's definition of SE centers on making these sales conversations more intelligent and engaging.

For early-stage management initiatives and emerging job roles, frameworks are helpful. Here is the IDC Sales Enablement Framework:

Starting on the left side of this Framework: IDC suggests that managers think about SE as starting in the marketing area (including Marketing Operations); and then moving to the Sales Operations area; and then into the actual selling functions.

Within the sphere of marketing activities, IDC research has found that over 40% of all marketing assets are not in use today, with some sales organizations reporting that as much as 90% of the assets created by their marketing peers are never used by sales teams. This includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects, and current customers. The top reason that assets are not used or that they are under-used, is that end-users are unable to access or locate these assets. Based upon anecdotal feedback from recent survey participants, the key root causes include: "too much material," old content and assets, and poor processes and technologies. The lack of relevance of content and assets is also cited as a reason for lack of asset utilization.

Sales enablement - from marketing's perspective - is more than simply using a content management system to get collateral and PowerPoint presentations to sales. It is the complete life-cycle management of content and marketing assets, including: content development; leveraging that content across the organization in a one-to-many fashion; collaboration with Sales Operations and the selling entities for the subsequent distribution and delivery of that content to sales (internal and external sales/partners); and the feedback loop from sales as part of continuous improvement.

Moving to the center of the Framework: this is Sales Operations' involvement in SE. An effective sales operations team should be ensuring that process excellence for SE is institutionalized for the entire selling organization. Sales Operations should seek SE best practices from all selling entities and share those practices company-wide. The sales operations team should take the lead on defining goals and objectives for SE; create and manage the processes and systems to meet those goals; provide overall execution over-sight and process governance; and then provide the measurement systems and reporting to track how SE progress is being achieved. As mentioned earlier, a key success factor for sales enablement is for strong collaboration between sales operations and marketing.

The final part of the SE Framework (right side) is the consumption and deployment of the content assets by Sales. The sellers should receive the benefits of the process and infrastructure groundwork that been built by marketing and sales operations. The first part of this is probably the most critical process-area of the entire Framework: How easy is it for the sales person to find the right content (in the right format), at the time that they need it, to help with a given sales conversation? The answer to this is one of the key levers in the Sales Productivity equation. More time in searching and seeking means less time in actual selling. As part of the reporting and metrics that Sales Operations is tracking to understand SE improvement, monitoring of this "searching" time should be an active metric - to reduce!

Effective SE also means that the content that Sales now has in hand, exists in the format or media that is appropriate for the conversation they wish to have. Does a PowerPoint presentation have all the content that the sales-person seeks, but the task of converting that into a Word proposal falls on the shoulders of the sales rep? Again, the definition of SE excellence has to include: "right time, right place, and right format".

Finally, the last step in this Framework is the sharing of SE best practices among the peer sales-people. This is perhaps the key litmus test of SE success. Sales people are smart and resourceful and seek expediency. If the marketing and sales operations elements of this Framework have been successfully deployed, the sales people will likely grasp and exploit it very quickly. Usage will become "viral" as SE best practices become quickly shared across the ranks."

Thanks Rich. Please feel free to email Rich directly at rvancil@idc.com or provide your comments below.

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