Why in-house marketers fail, almost always

It’s not that defaming marketing people that work directly for companies will be of any sales benefit to those of us on the other side. Each company makes their decision to hire firms based on many different reasons. However, understanding why outside firms are almost always more effective having not come from industry specific experience may help to tell whether or not is a good idea to do marketing in-house. To simplify, here is a very specific list of reasons that will probably apply to most companies and maybe help marketing companies better understand what companies need despite what they think they need.

1. “Inside Baseball”

• Knowing the intricacies of a product or service and the dynamics of a competitive market often blinds marketers to the real reasons people buy. In other words, a firm grasp of specific differences can cause people to ignore the things that matter to the buyer and replace it with technical differences. This is a very common occurrence and is very damaging to the ROI of a campaign.
• The longer someone has participated in a given industry, the more likely they are to rely on personal knowledge in place of real time data. Natural tendencies play a part in all of our lives but in marketing, they are killers. As markets evolve so to must the tactics used to engage them. Operating from a base of knowledge that is rooted in years of experience is counter-productive. New résumé tag: I know nothing about what you do!!!

2. “Personalities over Performance”

• Let’s face facts; it is much easier to fire a “firm” that under performs than it is to fire an employee we see on a daily basis. Most CEO’s I deal with tell me in private that working with their company will be a challenge specifically due to their staff. Translation; they are bad and I know it so good luck. Final approvals for things like copy will usually flow through these people. There is no better illustrator than reviewing the changes they recommend. It becomes easy to see why their marketing efforts have failed when copy changes are written so poorly, you wonder if they are just giving you a hard time. Oh, the stories I could tell!

3. “The internal struggle”

• People that excel in marketing do not bend to the will of internal pressure because they trust their own skills. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case. Most internal marketing departments are given “direction” or “advice” from department heads that still think the “where’s the beef” ads are cutting edge marketing. They take this direction to appease co-workers in order to maintain the appearance of being a “team player”. While I am all for being a team player, I do not think that Tom Brady listening to the tall boy is a good idea. Not that the tall boy is without his own merit but throwing a deep pass into a zone defense may not be his area of expertise. Experts don’t allow novices to dictate behavior.

4. “Pedigree over Instinct”

• It is the natural inclination of executive to hire people that posses a certain level of education and sometimes from a certain school. What we know in the world of sales and marketing is that good instincts and serious talent will outperform pedigree every day of the week and twice on Sunday. As performance fails to meet expectations, the assumption is that peripheral forces must be to blame. When obviously overmatched, these kinds of people go into CYA mode and make it very difficult to pin them down. This is a sure way to lose. Fearless pursuit of performance based facts will often bring things to light.

5. “Put up your dukes”

• Once inside of a large company, it is easy to see the things that would have been helpful from the beginning. MOST PEOPLE DON”T HAVE A CLUE! The best way to illustrate this is with a short anecdote. One of my clients had a new product that they wanted to take to a specific target market. We did our homework and put out a direct mail piece. I sent it off for approval and got back a flurry of questions. My response was very detailed and went something like this,”83% of people in this job were promoted from…… 91% of people that did that job were democrats. Over 65% of democrats feel that when government gets involved in an industry, prices go down. It is for this reason we felt it necessary to show them that prices will go up after the pending legislation passes and therefore it would save them money to act now.” Her reply? “Here at ……we don’t demean our customers!”
What do you say to that? We make no judgments about the facts; we simply incorporate them into our piece to ensure we hit the buying objections and the buying triggers! The point is that using real data was completely foreign to her. Appearing right is exponentially more important than actually being right in a lot of these cases. Had we known that their marketing department had never incorporated any real data, we would have signed a contract in 10 minutes. The lesson here is that you should assume nothing!

The bottom line is that as we delve into our prospects and their internal marketing departments, we do so at our own peril. Approaching this with the knowledge that rarely will we find a well oiled machine, prepares us to face the impending challenges that lie ahead. It should also serve as a guide as to why our services are needed whether they know it or not and how to best illustrate this to them. Either way, the knowledge that most companies have a totally ineffective or all together dysfunctional marketing department allows us to forge ahead confident in the knowledge that every conversation we have with prospects will only have one expert in them.