The Customer Service Survey
Oh Great! Still More Departments That Won't Talk to Each Other.
Fri - August 18, 2006 04:35 PM in
I might be competing with the announcement Peter just made, but I wanted to get a new entry in as Peter will be out of the office for much of next week and the blog access software is on his laptop, so no new entries until the 24th.
A few weeks ago, we were advised that we shouldn't be focusing our sales efforts on the call center market, but rather on the marketing department. The idea being that our research provides customer insights perhaps of more interest there than to the contact center. Made sense to at least pursue a parallel sales track, so I joined the American Marketing Association and attended the first local gathering last night.
This was a networking gathering of several marketing oriented membership groups, and what struck me was how segmented "marketing" has become. I won't get all the association acronyms right, so won't try. But as I understood it, there are associations for PR professionals, another for advertising, another for marketing copy writers, another for marketing managers, another for consumer affairs and still another for "sales and marketing". Whew. In any given day, I do ALL those things. Now, I can concede that in some organizations there needs to be a differentiation between sales and marketing. I can also argue that everybody in a company is, or should be, a marketer of their business. We're in a more specialized business world today, but aren't six different local association chapters to break up what used to be a single discipline a bit extreme?
Or am I just behind the times?
Posted by Rick Rappe
This was a networking gathering of several marketing oriented membership groups, and what struck me was how segmented "marketing" has become. I won't get all the association acronyms right, so won't try. But as I understood it, there are associations for PR professionals, another for advertising, another for marketing copy writers, another for marketing managers, another for consumer affairs and still another for "sales and marketing". Whew. In any given day, I do ALL those things. Now, I can concede that in some organizations there needs to be a differentiation between sales and marketing. I can also argue that everybody in a company is, or should be, a marketer of their business. We're in a more specialized business world today, but aren't six different local association chapters to break up what used to be a single discipline a bit extreme?
Or am I just behind the times?
Posted by Rick Rappe
Posted at 04:35 PM | | | | |