"We are searching for a VP of sales and marketing who has deep understanding of our core technology and products. We value your previous industry experience and management roles in similar companies. Highly appreciated but not necessary is your experience from R&D or manufacturing environments. As we tend to say in our company we qualify only the best of the bests - this time the best VP of sales and marketing."
"Your role is to build our international direct sales & reseller model, sales organization, CRM system, PR and communications, online store and social media approach, etc."
John Tech was selected among many candidates. John had a solid long time experience from similar products and had worked as a sales manager in the industry for a long time. His track record from national and neighboring countries sales was solid. John's technology knowledge was best among candidates because he had in his earlier days worked in R&D and was an engineer. John started in his new role.
John was able to deliver sales in home market. John knew the people so the task was not that difficult for him. John started to build in much slower pace international reseller network. He signed agreements with new reseller partners but actual sales numbers were nothing to celebrate. No one had asked in the interviews whether John had ever built new reseller models or in the markets which were new to him. John forgot to design performance based agreements with new resellers, just agreements to sell. Actually he had never built new networks just sold earlier in his career to resellers.
John was sent to Asia as well.... maybe the booming market could ignite international sales. Well John had never operated in Asia so local cultures, customs and decision making was new to him. He and other management kept on wondering how the sales is not booming in the booming market.
John started to build CRM. He had never built a CRM approach just used few CRM IT systems earlier in his career. John selected a CRM system and company implemented it as an IT project. No one in the company actually understood including John that CRM is a customer management approach enabled by IT. John urged everyone to store different customer visits to the system. Eventually no one understood why they had the IT system in place because it didn't seem to deliver any incremental sales.
John had no clue or interest towards marketing therefore he hired a marketing communications manager Mary Message to execute all kinds of communications stuff. Mary had worked all her life in PR and communications so in her new role kept on delivering all kinds of leaflets, brochures and customer events. John's advise to Mary was "I want that kind of advertising which gives me more sales". Nor John or Mary had any experience or interest to define customer strategies or other more strategic approaches to marketing. None were created.
Mary had earlier in her life belonged to communications function which handled company's website. Mary was a natural choice to build online presence. She had never built an online store but had hired consultants to create social media campaigns. Online approach including brand new online store didn't deliver greater success. No one actually paid too much attention to this because they were in the business to sell products not create online success.
Company decided to change its strategy. There is no point to sell products when software as a service is so much hotter trend. Who wants to sell products when you can sell it as a service. No one in the company including John or Mary had any experience from service business. New approach was launched with high hopes but still they couldn't conquer the world.
Eventually company decided they had wrong product (or a service as it was defined later) because it didn't deliver sales results - and they started to R&D new products. John was chosen to lead the whole company because he had best technology knowledge from new products they were developing. Owners appreciated this new strategy and had been patient because they believed in great products and eventually they could develop one.
No one questioned whether their sales and marketing had anything to do with poor results.
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