Infinity Blue

Ever been involved in the discussions on the importance of marketing vs. sales, or been embroiled in turf-wars between departments. Why do some companies have a Chief Marketing Officer and not a Chief Sales Officer? This can not be because sales are less important then marketing.

Real as these discussions are, for me they miss the point. Sales activities are critical in any company and if I only had to spend money on either sales or marketing then I would choose sales anytime – no sales, no profit, no future. But then again, I do want to be in business tomorrow too so building awareness, developing new products seem critical aswell.

The way we at Infinity look at it is that it is all about the ultimate objective: (profitable) Revenue. Revenue today, revenue tomorrow, revenue next year. That is the goal. Marketing and sales are different activities, disciplines and critical inputs but not goals in themselves. Therefore lets’ focus on Revenue and work out through what mix of activities this can best be achieved. Lets work out what competencies and combination of the two we need and how we use them. It is about finding flexible new ways of marrying the two together.

They realize this at Fedex and at Coca Cola where they now have Chief Revenue Officers responsible for all sales and marketing, and any other activity that is key input to revenue performance.

Fedex and Coca Cola are in good company – we at Infinity have had the same tag-line (some people call this a ‘pay-off’ which is a word more appropriate in this case) for four years now, and will not change it. We are not about marketing or about sales as such. We are about revenue. Our pay-off says it all: ‘International Revenue Performance. Delivered’!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 9:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.