Are You Bilingual?
OK. So when I grew up in Montreal, being bilingual meant you needed to speak english and french. So what’s that got to do with marketing and messaging? Quite simply one of marketing’s jobs is to clearly engage customers and prospects, guide them to your value proposition, and deliver messages and tools to ensure they buy your product or service. In order to accomplish this in high tech you really need to speak multiple languages: Technical and Sales.
In my experience it is rare that you have people on your team who can effectively engage with engineering while simultaneously position, message, and embrace sales to win customers. To do this effectively they need to be “bilingual”
So how do you assess candidates on their ability in these two dimensions? I always like it when people can boil things down to a simple concept (another good marketing trait). One time when I was interviewed as a product manager the interviewer said, “OK you go to a company party. Sales is on one side of the room, engineering is on the other side. Which group do instinctly go hang out with?” This was an excellent question.
Another time I was looking to get product marketing training for my product management team. I explained why I needed it to a colleague, and he said,” OK, you have great guys who know how to build product, you need to teach them how to sell it.”
Another dimension is can you talk to the executives and the worker bees? Heavy Hitter has some good quotes on on exectutives expect.
Are you bilingual? Hang with sales or engineering? Prefer to build it or sell it? Talk to c level or b level?
There was a time when big companies (like Travelers Insurance, where I started my career) where a select group of entry-level people went on a rotation right from the beginning through several departments. From engineering, to auditing, marketing, etc. This created a class of employees that understood the business from many aspects, and from where leaders could come.
In our start-up culture, every one is looking for specialists, people with a niche and expertise that can be measured with specific technologies (Java) or certifications (CPA). The value of a renaissance man/woman that understands many businesses, speaks several languages and engages people at different levels of an organization is not accounted for in the interviewing process or hiring decisions.
Companies and executives must allow people to move throughout the company, and foster a culture of holistic understanding of the business for those people that want to be bilingual.
So what was your answer during the interview… Hang with sales or engineering?
At a party – sales
I am bilingual. I speak analytics (meaning I am a competent hands-on analyst who understands statistics, data mining and text analysis) and marketing (which means communicating the benefits of those things to business people in business terms).
Jorge makes a good point here. How does it affect customers when corporate management and sales staff do not understand their own products?