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Separation of Sales, IT and Marketing

If you're easily offended, don't read this....I'm just tired.

You'll find plenty of articles online on how everyone needs to collaborate together as a team, blah, blah, blah.

What these articles fail to tell you most often is how.

Having experience in all 3 fields, I find it interesting, and extremely aggravating, how in every job that I've had, sales staff wants to neglect their duties and focus all of their attention on marketing, IT, Graphics Design, etc. That sentence was maybe somewhat over-exaggerated but I hope that you can easily see my frustration; my heart-beat's elevating, and that neck-vein is starting to throb just by writing this article.

My problem is that everyone's an expert. If you have experience building websites, designing networks, researching and installing new hardware, creating industry specific graphics design, marketing online or offline, and are currently stuck in sales due to consecutive bad luck with hiring agents or some other excuse, then I'll listen to your suggestions and your logic.

If you haven't read a single article on marketing, don't know how to program, can't differentiate between a hard drive and a CPU and think that Photoshop is used exclusively to erase the blemishes off of your skin, then back off.

That might have come off too harsh. Let me try to explain in a more reasonable tone. The sales staff does a great job selling. If you have a desk job, your job most likely is to be on the phone. If you're not receiving phone calls, writing up orders or answering emails, you're making phone calls. You're actively seeking new clients because that's your job. I hope that you have such an insane amount of clients that the company has to hire an additional sales person to help alleviate you of all of your missed sales responsibilities because you honestly don't have time for anything else.

However, that's not the case most of the time. Most times, you're sitting there waiting for a phone call. You might as well quit your job in sales and become a waiter, because that's exactly what you're doing: you're waiting for the sale to find you and for you to write up the order. To re-iterate again, the company doesn't need an order taker, they need a sales person.

This doesn't bother me until management makes one crucial mistake: they empower the sales staff to the point that they think they know everyone's job. We in marketing, IT, Web Development, Graphics Design, etc, also make a mistake. If you asked me to take the position I am about to advocate a couple of years ago, I would have protested citing pompousness, arrogance and condescendence.

Now, I see the importance in separating yourself and your knowledge from people not actively participating as members of your group or members of your field. Just because I can explain something related to my job, doesn't mean that you know how to do it; it just means that I was successful in explaining it.

Simple example:
We're going to create a simple program that mimics a deck of cards, shuffles the cards, and display the first four cards in a deck. That's a very logical sentence that every English speaking person should understand.

If you were a programmer, the explanation would start off the same and would then continue to:
If you're using Java, you'll create a class called DeckOfCards. Initialize the deck, suits and ranks arrays. Create a loop to assign the 52 cards in numeric form to the deck array. Loop through the deck and generate a random index on each iteration. Assign a temp variable to hold the current deck array value. Assign the random index value generated to the current deck array value. Assign the temp value to the random deck value generated. Iterate through the first four cards and find the suit by dividing the deck with the current value by 13 and passing the result as the key value of the suits array. Similar concept with ranks. Take the current deck value and get the remainder through modulo 13 passing the result as the key to the ranks array. Print out the card number, rank and suit.

So when does this confusion start? It usually starts when management wants to have company wide meeting and have everyone participate. Great! However, no direction is given. We explain what we're doing and we ask for one and only one type of input from you: data! You are, after all, closest to the customer. What product is the customer desiring so that we may feature it? Are you getting any complaints from the customers on anything related to our field? Are you having any issues figuring anything out? But mostly data.

That empowers the sales staff to believe that after a brief 30 minute meeting, each one of them has become certified marketers, web-designers/developers, IT guys, etc. The company should start paying attention to the following statement: Your sales staff starts neglecting their work and starts researching marketing techniques, website designs that they find appealing, new hardware or software for the company, etc. It almost seems like an escape from the constant customer interaction that they have to do. If you're not enjoying your job, go back to school, teach yourself, etc, off work hours and find yourself a new job, please. Stop coming up to your IT, marketing or graphics design department every day and giving them your ideas. If you do you'll have to be prepared for them to shut you down nicely the first few times, and more aggressively as time moves on. Don't get offended, but it will happen. And please for the love of everything holy stop asking me to explain my reasoning to you. If you don't understand, read some more, go to school, whatever it takes: I'm not hear to teach you how to become a programmer, the psychology behind marketing, or the reason I picked a particular color for the catalog. The managers need to step up and remind their sales staff the position that they were hired for.

I could have sugarcoated this but I literally have email templates describing certain situations due to the amount of times I get asked the same question. It seems that as soon as get through one sales person, he quits and another one comes around, starting my cycle of aggravation all over again.

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