“Not My Job” – The Natural Antagonism between Marketing and Technology

Good design is more than just beautiful images.  Design includes information design – researching the manner in which a customer first encounters your company and what information is delivered in what order and what format. It also includes sales choreography – the steps you take to move a client from first contact to transaction. And of course it includes the technology design of your website. Poor, or “broken,” design, wastes money, time, effort and resources – we all know this, and yet we all have components of our marketing systems that are broken, or become broken, from time to time. Why is this? There is a very humorous video by Seth Godin in which he describes the reasons very eloquently:

1. Not my job
2. Selfish jerks
3. The world changed
4. I don’t know
5. I’m not a fish
6. Contradictions
7. Broken on purpose

The majority of problems we see in aviation marketing systems are a result of  Reason #1- Not My Job. In many cases, marketing and sales people are separate from the technology people in the organization, or the technological work of building and maintaining the company’s website is outsourced to a technology company. There is a natural antagonism between sales and marketing professionals.

• Sales and marketing professionals have the objective of making sales.

• Technology professionals have the objective of building a “whiz-bang, golly-gee, that’s cool” website that will be a great addition to their portfolio and will impress their peers and future clients.

This results in a lot of broken sales and marketing systems, as evidenced by:

• Unnecessary video, sound or other media that “take over” the user experience every time they visit the site, or that tie up a slow connection or don’t work on a particular device.
• Outdated information on a website that can’t be updated without paying more fees to the technology company.
• Information on the website that is not consistent with the sales process.
• Forms or links that don’t work, or that are not followed up appropriately by sales process.

Our solution  is to create websites and marketing systems that are as simple as possible.  We subscribe firmly to Steve Jobs philosophy of technology in service of people instead of the other way around. Sales and marketing professionals should be  “in charge” of the  tools that we use. We should be able to manage content as much as possible and able to adapt it to the changing needs of the organization and the sales process as it evolves.   Our emphasis is on sales and marketing, and we have technology experts on our team who understand their role is to make the process work; not developing technology for its own sake. Come to our webinar with Muhammad Farooq on March 14 at 1:00 MST and bring your questions about technology and its place in sales and marketing!   If you’re a coaching or consulting client, you’ve already been invited. If you’d like an invitation, please let us know. .