Matthew Davis, CMO at TradePending, and we’re to help sales and marketing teams at dealerships.

I’ve got a question that’s really simple to ask, but can be really difficult to answer. What is marketing’s role?

I ask that question to every person we interview for a marketing position, and to every new employee that we onboard, and we always get a range of answers. Most of them are usually right in some kind of way.

The responses are usually some blend of “build brand awareness” or “run campaigns” or send email newsletters or do paid ads or create demand.

There’s one question you can keep asking to get to the truth, or at least my version of the truth.

“Why do we do that?”  If you keep asking Why, you’ll end up, “because we want to sell more”.

And there it is. Marketing’s purpose, no matter if it’s at a car dealership, a software company, a non-profit, whatever, is to help the company sell more at a lower cost.

Say it again. Marketing’s purpose is to help the company sell more at a lower cost.

That last point “at a lower cost” is key for me. That acknowledges that the sales team is very much a 1×1 proposition. Each sale happens one at a time, but marketers can reach 100s, 1000s, 10s of 1000s of people a lot more quickly and affordably.

The other critical aspect of this philosophy, and it’s hard to understate how important this really is,  is that it ties marketing to the company’s revenue goals, and the sales team’s goals. It’s get them aligned and will result in a lot less tension between sales and marketing too.

Don’t agree? I’ll debate you on this all day. Lemme know.