Stop Wasting on Sales and Marketing

February 8, 2011

The following pattern strikes me as bizarre, almost crazy, and yet I see it present at many expansion stage software companies: Spend tons of money on sales and marketing like it’s the company’s sole mission and avoid “expensive” luxuries like a User Experience / Interaction designer, a GUI artist, and perhaps even a true Product Manager.

And yet, hiring a single, good UX designer, even to support an existing Product Manager for just a year, can have an impact on sales and profits that a full sales and marketing team wouldn’t achieve in five years (or ever). This is especially true for B2C companies and any B2B business targeting SMB’s or enterprise departments with down-loadable, trial-able and SaaS products.

One way to look at sales and marketing (and perhaps even customer support), is as a complete waste. Sales and marketing do for the product what it cannot do for itself. The problem is, once a product is out there, and it never markets or sells itself, you must continue to scale those functions to build a business.

But what if the product marketed and sold itself? What if you built the product and you just sent it out into the wild, and only supported it with highly targeted expenditures to give it a lift once in a while? What if every marketing dollar you spent on the product led to out-sized ROI because every single person who encountered it, downloaded and adopted it in 10 minutes, fell in love with it and told all his or her colleagues and friends about it, who then did the same? What if sales people were just educators and enablers who helped prospects achieve their goals? Is this because its UI wasn’t just sleek and cool but designed carefully with an interaction model for your exact prospects in mind?

What if instead of achieving this fantastic result you achieved only 25% of your goal? Or 50%? What if you increased your conversion from trial to purchase by just 50%? How many sales and marketing dollars have you spent trying to achieve that in the past 12 months and failed?

The only way to build such a product is to have the following functions (combined with good engineering):

  • Product Management
  • UX / Interaction design
  • Graphic design

That’s basically anywhere from 2-3 additional hires to your current engineering team.

And yet, astonishingly, most software companies, especially B2B, don’t even bother with these hires, while they spend millions on sales and marketing.

And the less a product can help itself, the more marketing and sales forces it down someone’s throat, creating a worse ROI situation.

So stop wasting sales and marketing dollars and instead invest in:

  • A better product management process
  • UX and graphic designers
  • Creating competitive advantage through better product interface rather than lead generation services

Senior Director Project Management

Igor Altman is Senior Director of Product Management at <a href="https://www.mdsol.com/en/">Medidata Solutions</a>, a leading global provider of cloud-based clinical development solutions that enhance the efficiency of customers’ clinical trials. Prior to Medidata, he worked at OpenView focusing on new investments in the IT space.