I recently had lunch with a friend who runs a pre-launch eClinical technology company and he asked me a question about the sales and marketing roles. He was wondering if the sales and marketing executive roles should be run by one person or two. I gave him a quick, gut-level answer, but the more I thought about it, the more interesting a question it became.
Like many such questions, the answer depends on the size of your company and the stage of growth. For early-stage companies, there is so much work that needs to be done to understand the market and to develop a messaging platform that resonates for the target audience. Because this work is critical for both the sales and the marketing departments, I believe it can be beneficial to have one person manage both areas.
The messaging and differentiation need to be tested and re-tested in these early days. The sales people are on the front lines, getting this feedback on a regular basis, and need to be able to share this information quickly with the marketing team. Having a VP of Sales and Marketing who is talking to both areas can help with creating this closed-loop process.
As the company grows, it becomes harder to effectively manage both areas for a couple of reasons. The sales and marketing executives need to go deeper in their areas to be increasingly effective. By that, I mean that they need to have a complete grasp of the strategic and tactical avenues available to them to take a $5MM company to $20MM, then to $100MM. It is rare to find someone who has that depth of experience in both the sales and the marketing disciplines.
But if you can find the right person, having both roles under one leader can help in one other key way. In many organizations there is finger-pointing and division between sales and marketing. The more you can help these two important departments to feel responsible to each other, the better the integration and the more successful the top-line efforts. Having the same leader over both areas can help to build a bridge and can emphasize the importance of the departments working together.
Obviously, as the company grows it also becomes more difficult to manage larger numbers of employees. I’ve seen it way too often that an executive or manager is tasked with leading too many direct reports, particularly in smaller companies. The truth is, you can’t effectively manage more than five direct reports. It takes too much time to give each employee the mentoring, guidance and feedback they need (and deserve). Particularly in Sales, there is a point of diminishing returns when trying to manage larger numbers of direct reports. Add in marketing staff on top of that and you are short-changing both departments.
Interestingly, it is at the very small and very large companies that the VP of Sales and Marketing position makes the most sense. At the small end, for the reasons we discussed before. At the large end, because then you can afford to hire experts to individually manage the sales team and the marketing team and who can “go deep” in each respective area, leaving the top executive to focus on big picture items. Often at small-growing-to-medium companies, there isn’t the luxury of hiring these experts, because the emphasis is on cash conservation.