I have to admit to harboring an extreme prejudice.
It rears its ugly head when a start up CEO comes into our office to take us through their business, introduces the management team and describes one of the executives as the “VP Sales & Marketing”.
At that point, I stop listening and start thinking about how I can end the meeting on a professional note. Like the mythical Unicorn, I don’t believe in the mythical VP Sales & Marketing. Actually, I am more likely to believe in Unicorns than a VP Sales & Marketing.
Why? Simple. Sales and Marketing are vastly different functions that require substantially different personalities, skills, and decades of experience to master. In my 30 years of operating experience, I have found very few people - I mean less than a handful – who are experts at both functions. And, for that rare individual, in my experience I do not believe it is possible to head up both functions simultaneously.
A CEO who doesn’t understand this basic fact, or doesn’t believe it, is not a CEO I want to invest in. Here is why.
Someone who is a head of Sales must have an in depth understanding of current key deals in the sales pipeline, a deep sense of the probability of whether those deals will close, and what it will take for them to close. This is a 1:1, short-term focus game and success is predicated upon a career of working closely with buyers. In many cases, it also requires someone to travel and meet with prospects to gauge for themselves whether or not a deal is really a deal. It is the realm of oral communicators.
The head of Marketing, on the other hand, must develop and maintain an in depth understanding of the overall market and the company’s brand in that market. To do this, he/she must constantly work with industry analysts, the media, execute tradeshows, keynotes, and the web. Perhaps even more importantly, today’s head of Marketing must be an excellent demand creator (the “owner” of future revenue) through sales-ready leads.
Marketers must know how to generate those sale-ready leads for the lowest acquisition cost and ultimately nurture any sales-ready leads that fall out of the sales pipeline. This is a 1:many game and requires constant refinement through analyzing campaign, market and customer data. It requires continuous meetings with internal staff including the CEO, Product Marketing, Sales, etc. It is the realm of verbal/written communicators.
A CEO who has combined the Sales and Marketing functions, indirectly but undeniably, telegraphs me that he/she does not truly understand the diverse nature of these positions and the fact that it is impossible to execute both functions simultaneously with excellence. In most instances, I have found that the CEO who makes this serious mistake hasn’t worked with someone who is an excellent Marketer and therefore discounts the role it plays.
So, if you ever come and present to me and think you are going to show me a “real” VP Sales & Marketing, don’t be surprised when I look at you as though you’re trying to convince me there are Unicorns and excuse myself early from the meeting.
Wow…You sound like the last VC that I would pick to be on my team. In case you weren’t aware, startups require wearing many hats and that usually means you can’t hire a VP Sales and a VP Mktg, especially if you’re pre-funding. In the meantime, a talented, experienced, and knowledgeable person may have to be the VP sales & mktg. It doesn’t look like you’ve ever worked for a startup so you may want to re-think this ‘extreme prejudice’.
Bruce,
Could not agree with you more. I have seen this happening all the time. Companies (startup and late stage) think of marketing as a necessary evil and find the next person around whose role not is clearly defined and task him/her with Marketing role. Also combining the roles into Sales and Marketing into one person. Granted with SaaS businesses the two disciplines have much more of a intersection, than the olden days, with much more being asked of marketing(including ROI) around lead qualification, ranking etc to increase sales velocity but I firmly believe these are two distinctly different roles.
Hi Bruce, I like the succinct way you put it: one to one v/s one to many.
So many VPs all over the shop, and here I wonder what else that acronym could stand for, do neither very well.
I think in some vases that some companies are either too small or small minded to split that role into 2.
Cheers
Dan
Bruce,
Spot on! All of the nuances around the differences are right on, the other point you make about present and future is also applicable to other roles in a startup. Simply put a roles responsibilities have to have a common time horizon or you asking for trouble. Take customer support, operations and product development. While in a SaaS company these all involve technology, support runs in 4 hour bites, operations needs to insure stability and capacity on a month/quarterly basis and development needs to insure the right stuff is built 6-12-18 months from now. Much like with the sales and marketing roles, this time horizon issue is one to watch because it will bite you in the backside. Asking an executive to build and manage an organization to various horizons will usually not end well.
Thanks for the great post.
Amen. The mentality isn’t limited to startups. I work with a number of larger organizations who think it’s a good idea to have sales and marketing report to a single person.
I think it stems from a CEO (or collective senior exec) mindset that just wants to sweep marketing under the rug, and limit the number of execs on the senior team.
Thanks for a great post.
I agree completely. I have always found the combination of the 2 to be ineffective and have been curious as to why it’s done so often. I think it tends to result from the propensity of some sales guys who think they can do marketing (“how hard can it be? The marketing guys do it!
). Kind of like the engineers who think they are marketeers too. I find most “true” marketing types don’t see themselves as salesmen, nor do they want to be. Good insights and a good articulation of the differences between the 2 roles. Thanks for sharing.
Amen… and thank you for saying so. As VP Sales I’ve worked for several start-ups where the CEO expected me to deliver the marketing role. And only after I had accepted the job by the way. Not having Marketing makes the job of selling much more challenging…
In respsonse to Start Up CEO:
If you read my background, you’ll see I’ve been involved in several small fledgling start ups: Oracle, my own, and Siebel Systems.
I joined Oracle in the early 1980’s when there were only a couple dozen people. I started my own start up and successfully sold it in 1992 and I joined Siebel Systems as a founding member of the executive team.
None of these start ups had any venture money in them.
So, I may not be the VC you want on your team but I’ve had three fairly successful start up outcomes and none of them had a VP Sales & Marketing.
I do appreciate your point that people need to wear many hats in the very early stages. However, if I only saw companies do this in the beginning, I probably wouldn’t have written about it.
As someone who was a VP of Sales and Marketing I agree and disagree with you. My expertise was on the sales side and I was not a VP of Marketing.
We got around this with a very sharp Director of Marketing and utilizing an outside agency. The outside agency really gave us a more scalable story and reach (we decided) than a true Marketing leader.
Out of necessity I have been in both roles over the years and have to say you are absolutely right Bruce. In my experience startups hire a sales person and put them in charge of marketing much to its neglect. They would be better off hiring a part time marketing executive for the most part.
I agree with your statement. As a VP of sales in start-ups, it’s my experience that the business is best served by getting known as soon as possible. In the hands of a solid marketer and commitment/investment by the CEO/BoD, a qualified pipeline will emerge. This accelerates the ability to get a sales head who can rapidly convert prospects to customers.
[...] and shouldn’t be. Interwest investor Bruce Cleveland recently wrote an article entitled, In Search of the Mythical VP Sales and Marketing where he defines the separate domains of sales and [...]
Susan:
As I said in the article, even if someone has both skill sets I do not believe someone can execute both functions simultaneously with excellence; they are both 200% fulltime jobs.
You said “I have found very few people – I mean less than a handful – who are experts at both functions.” So maybe it’s not that people can’t do both gigs.. it’s just the wrong people get hired and those hiring don’t search hard enough.. I do belive in unicorns
Susan
Bruce, your post here strikes me as polemical and doctrinaire. So you’ve NEVER seen a startup grow to be successful with a VP of Sales & Marketing? Hmmm. I’d be happy to point you toward examples.
When there is a VP of Sales & Marketing, it is typically held by someone who is Big S, Little M or vice versa. The Little part of equation is supported by a strong counterpart in the opposite role. So while there are few Bo Jackson’s in the world, capable of playing two vastly different sports at high levels (football = sales, baseball = marketing) there are plenty of quality executives who are capable of MANAGING the function.
The benefit of a VP over both functions is that you get absolute accountability for making the number. You avoid a situation where a VP Sales is pointing to the lack of effective marketing, while the VP Marketing points to the poor sales execution.
There is no debate that they are two very different functions – that’s why they are carry different labels – but in my experience across 25+ successful startups, there exist plenty of unicorns.
Bill: Sorry. I may be polemical and doctrinaire but it comes after 30 years of operating success personally helping to build multi-billion $ software companies (e.g. Oracle/Siebel) from early to late stage and sitting on the BOD of others. I respect your success with other companies, but I fundamentally don’t believe there are plenty of execs capable of managing both functions – especially simultaneously. If you’re focused on driving short term revenue, how can you possibly be creating a comprehensive product/positioning strategy, writing the press releases, designing the campaigns, etc? There isn’t enough time in a day/week. If you put someone in who is “little M”, you are discounting the function — by definition, the ‘little M’ is doing the work but isn’t a ’senior exec’. These are both huge jobs that are incredibly important and while as a very small company you may need to ‘make do’ by wearing multiple hats, it should be temporal at best. If you take this approach, you might make a company successful but you are crippling your company’s ability to become a global market leader — which puts it in the category of an Oracle, Google, etc. That is why we didn’t do this at Siebel and we didn’t do it at Oracle..or any other company I’ve been involved with or in. Nor will we.
[...] the same time, I had to think of a blog entry by Bruce Cleveland of InterWest Partners on the Mythical VP Sales & Marketing. The rationale of the article was that there are very few great VPs of Sales & Marketing in the [...]
Bruce,
Good insight and I could not agree more… granted as the one gentleman indicates there are times when you might have to wear multiple hats in the beginning but the sooner you divide and conquer with the right skill sets in the right management roles the sooner you will really start to scale your company…
All the best!
G
Bruce,
I completely agree with you. Early in my career, everyone was a VP of Sales and Marketing — either a sales person who picked up Marketing or a marketing person who picked up Sales. In all instances, one function was promoted to the detriment of the other. As a VP of Marketing in my previous companies, I worked in close concert with the VP of Sales and found the two personalities different but complementary as well as creating a necessary push-pull between short-term tactical and long-term strategic thinking.
Also, your blog reminded me of an article from De Novo ventures, a well-respected Life Sciences VC, that I thought this group may enjoy.
http://www.denovovc.com/articles/should_i_hire.pdf
Best,
Maureen
Maureen:
Great article on the differences between the roles. Thanks for sharing.
It really doesn’t matter much but for streamlining operations. Sales and marketing are tied as they’re the key components for revenue, marketing for demand creation (providing leads), sales for execution (lead hit rate). You can break this up again to marketing going to business development (writing product specs) and marketing communications (advertising, blog, etc). Sales can be broken up into new sales vs recurring or strategic vs tactical (regional) or whatever.
Discounting someone for streamlining operations without going into details is maybe a little premature. Regardless, both of these are scalable placeholder roles, especially in startup mode, where everything rides on development and the CEO should really be the main sales and marketing. At least to get initial traction, let others pick it up later once model is proven.
At that point you’re just balancing headcount to appropriate cost structures so what does it matter if some roles are consolidated for conservative planning costs, it’s not like these are for development or anything, just management roles.
Matt:
I think we are actually in agreement here. What I react to is when this isn’t being done due to the fact the company needs to conserve cash, etc. but when the CEO just isn’t aware that these are two fulltime jobs with different skill sets required. One of our portfolio companies is guilty of this and they are a $100M company so there is no excuse — at least as far as I am concerned.
[...] The Mythical VP Sales & Marketing"the CEO who makes this serious mistake hasn’t worked with someone who is an excellent Marketer and therefore discounts the role it plays." I think this sentiment can be applied to plenty of other roles in an organization, too. [...]