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.

Tags: Big-M Marketing, Product Marketing, Technical Marketing

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