So far we’ve talked about the Product Marketing function — the managers that drive the product line and worry about the gross profits, the forecasts, the product launches, the literature to support the line, and so forth.  And we’ve talked about the Tactical Marketing function — typically reporting to Product Marketing, that drives the day to day transactions, the quotes, the deals going down.  What remains is the third and last of what we call the marketing “line” functions — Technical Marketing.  Like Tactical Marketing, the technical marketing people typically report to Product Marketing.  That means that in a typical product marketing centric marketing department, each product line has the three functions arranged as a triad — Product Marketing (at the top), Tactical Marketing, and Technical Marketing.  The more product lines you have, the more of these marketing triads you’d have.

I came up with the idea of a separate Technical Marketing function at Zilog.  The problem was that the product marketing people were not technical enough to talk spec issues with customer engineers.  The tactical marketing people were even less so.  But in a chip company, for instance, there is a daily stream of technical requests for explanations of specs, proposed parameter changes, applications design assistance, and so on.  Much of this work is done by Field Applications Engineers, FAE’s, working in field sales.  But where do they get their information?  Customers that don’t contact marketing directly, go through the FAE’s and those requests are funneled to marketing for answers.  Technical Marketing is made up of engineers who enjoy working with customers.  They work the data sheet issues, drafting new ones for new product variations, writing applications notes, and responding to technical questions from customers and FAE’s.

Much of your reputation for responsiveness will come from how well Technical Marketing deals with the stream of customer questions.  Without a separate group, whether it’s one person or several, marketing and sales will be dependent on company design engineers.  Make no mistake about it… answering those questions is a full-time job… perhaps for several people.  If you make this a secondary responsibility for your design engineers, they will never get anything designed.  You could streamline the process a bit by having customers contact your design engineers directly, but that would be a disaster.  The main reason is that the flow of questions and answers between the company and its customers is a key part of the sales process.  Detouring them into design engineering would be a serious setback to sales.  What’s more, I always want conversations with customers framed in the terms and messaging that marketing has constructed.  That takes practice and total understanding of the message we want to send… not something we can send an expanatory note to design engineering and hope they’ll remember it and manage the messaging nuances when talking to customers.

The addition of Technical Marketing gives each product line a championship marketing group.  Between the three, Product Marketing, Tactical Marketing, and Technical Marketing, you are able to manage the line, set strategies for it, work the forecasts, make presentations, and plan new products.  You can do effective product launches, and provide customers with complete literature and respond to their technical questions.  And, with Tactical Marketing, you can drive the sales force, working quotes and chasing deals.  And you can do it all quickly and efficiently.

Breaking marketing line responsibility into these three functions makes it easier to find people to work those functions.  And it’s an easy organization to scale.  Add a new product line, and you add a marketing triad to manage it.  Now there’s more to marketing than these three functions, but these are the marketing “line” functions.  There are three others that are not line functions but work to support the product marketing triads.  We’ll talk about them in upcoming posts.  Stay tuned.

We’ve talked about Product Marketing — the first of the Big-M marketing functions — as the person or group that “manages” the product lines.  They worry about the gross margin dollars their line is bringing in, what it takes to “complete the product” in terms of complementary parts and software, the literature and promotional lineup, sales training, customer adoption rates, and so forth.  If this sounds all inclusive, it’s not, mainly because of the personality of the type of person who takes on this job.  These people are managers and, as such, they tend to be locked up in meetings working over the line forecasts, new product launches, customer presentations, and so on.  In short, they can be a little hard to get hold of.

Tactical marketing takes on the job of “making the market” for the products.  If you picture the Product Marketing Manager in a conference room going through a PowerPoint presentation to the company management, then the picture of the Tactical Manager is the person at a desk with two phones to his ears working with the sales force to close deals, or in the commodity pits trading oil futures with frenzied gestures.  This is someone who always has to be available.  And if the sales force isn’t calling him, then he’s calling the sales force… “What’s happening out there???  Let’s get something going!”

As large customers work with the sales force to get quotes on the company products, those requests for quote are relayed into Tactical Marketing where the pricing is assembled and passed back to the appropriate sales person.  Prices are never given to customers directly — they are always passed through the sales force.  We’ll have a lot more to say about this process in future posts.

Now you may be asking, “if the Product Marketing group is responsible for the success of the product line, how does that work if it’s Tactical Marketing that is working the sales force and generating the price quotes?”  Well, usually Tactical Marketing works for Product Marketing.  For instance at Zilog, we had three major product lines, each driven by a Product Marketing group.  Each of those three groups had their own Tactical Marketing function that handled the minute-by-minute sales activity, worked the sales force, drove the quote process, and helped build the sales forecast.  Newer product lines that had not yet been adopted by many customers only had one tactical marketing person.  The biggest line had three.  Since Zilog was a silicon valley company, it was three hours out of sync with the east coast.  The tactical marketing people were assigned geographic areas, and that meant the one handling the east coast came in earlier so she could work the sales people there when they were most likely to be at their offices.

One of the benefits of organizing Tactical Marketing like this is that the individual sales people always talk to the same tactical person, at least for any given product line.  That means they build up a working relationship and a level of trust that is critical for the success of the line (and the sales person).  It also means that when the monthly sales forcast is being judged by Product Marketing, there are essentially in-house specialists for that product line and that sales territory intimately familiar with the deals in progress, their liklihood of closing, and where the prices will ultimately end up.

Obviously the type of person that thrives in tactical marketing is totally different than the person who gravitates towards product marketing.  For one thing, product marketing people tend to be more technical, so they can understand and weigh the various technical product features against the competition.  For another, they are comfortable presenting to management groups, and taking responsibility for the line forecast the company will build to.  Tactical people tend to have what is sometimes called “street-smarts” and could sell any kinds of product, technical or not.  They excel at reading people and understanding when buyers are fibbing about their delivery requirements, quantities, competitors’ pricing, and so forth.

By assigning these two functions — product and tactical — to different people, you take advantage of the differing personality types to get the optimum results.  And an active product line definitely requires this amount of attention!  Having a set of really sharp tactical people will improve your gross margins faster than anything else you can do!