How Does Marketing Fit into Your Company Structure?

Is your marketing in alignment with your mission statement?

Another way to describe marketing activities is to consider the big picture of how they fit in with the other business functions.

Through marketing efforts, decisions are made and strategies are implemented concerning:

• What products, goods, services or ideas, are to be offered
• To whom —the target market
• How to inform potential customers of the offering, how to make the transaction, etc

Products are created through production efforts. Capital and operating funds are managed and tracked in the accounting-finance area; the human resource focus is employees and the policies concerning them.

A marketing approach relies upon the coordination of several business functions to be successful.

For example:

• The product might need some tweaking by producer of the product to respond to customer complaints.
• The person who handles human resource issues might be asked to develop compensation plans that reward sales people who build significant relationships that have tremendous potential, but are slow to close.
• Special payment plans might need to be implemented by the accounting staff to accommodate a variety of customer needs.

As a result, marketing usually crosses more departmental boundaries out of necessity than other business functions do. Marketing requires the orchestration of everyone who plays a part in the common goal of pleasing the customer.

A Holistic Marketing Mindset

For a small business owner who has no employees, this means that he/she needs to mentally tear down the walls between varied business functions and think holistically when it comes to marketing strategies.

These are the marketing fundamentals:

• Producing what the customer wants should be the focus of business operations and planning.
• Creating profitable sales volume, not just sales volume, is a necessary goal.
• Coordinating between marketing activities and all other functions within a business that affect marketing efforts is a must.

Even a small business owner who wears ALL the hats, needs to know what order to put them on and when to take them off.

I’m a very capable marketing technician. I’ve been trained to know what to do, and why, to what probable result. Over the years, as both a content developer for Pleiades’ clients and as a SBDC counselor, I’ve had lots of practice and plenty of lessons learned. Joe Vitale, however is a “Guru status, marketing maven. He knows all of the above and executes with panache. Any marketing book by Joe is a good business investment.

As a retired SBDC counselor, I know where to find business-related information — both online and IRL. In this case my marketing source is a SBA publication (Ohio Women’s Business Network, Columbus, OH, 6/97). For individual business support with any aspect of your business contact the nearest SBA-sponsored Small Business Development Center.