Why don’t you pay your VP of Marketing or CMO the same as your VP of Sales?
This may seem like a radical concept. But as CEOs and business leaders, our success is often in how we hire, and how we motivate our team.
The classic answer to the question is that the VP of Sales is more important. They bring in the revenue. Power in a company is directly proportional to proximity to the revenue stream. Marketing is behind the lines. Therefore they should be paid less.
But in today’s environment, buyers say they find their vendors 80% of the time rather than the other way around. When they do find you, they are much further down the sales funnel than they used to be. They no longer rely as much on sales people to provide information, or help them understand how your products and services help them solve a problem. When the prospect doesn’t buy from you, 80% buy a similar product or service within 18 to 24 months. Sales doesn’t nurture prospects for that amount of time. Their attention span is too short. You don’t want sales doing these things, because they also aren’t very good at it, and you want them selling. <see How Many Sales People Does It Take To Screw In A Forecast?>
Who does these valuable things? Marketing.
Our prejudice is to believe Marketing offers less value. That the return is harder to measure. But whose fault is this? While there is a lot of crappy marketing going on out there, a big portion of it is our fault.
For what other function would you lower your expectations, and therefore pay less? When you set low expectations, you get crappy results. This doesn’t mean you should pay for crappy results. But what if you changed your expectations?
There’s a new wave of brilliant marketers out there, using sophisticated new tools to bring prospects through your funnel. They are going to work for the people who “get” marketing and who challenge them. They are going to add tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to their company’s revenues. But maybe not yours.
At minimum, they are going to want the same goals as sales if not similar incentives. Because when Sales and Marketing don’t have the same goals and rewards, they piss at each other, and your company suffers.
You get what you pay for. Raise your expectations… and your pay.
Do Great Things!
L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110 (C)