I receive this email solicitation about once a month. And each time I mentally calculate whether the value of 30 minutes of my time is greater than that of an iPod shuffle.
It is not. Plus, I think we all know that the time investment on this one is going to include hours of dodging follow-up calls, webinar invitations and so on.
I don't think this is a bad offer, and I suspect that for a given slice of the market, it works. I hope the marketers above are correctly answering one of the most important questions in business: who's your Daddy?
For me, in this instance, my Daddy is productivity. I am not prepared to give up 30 minutes of it for something I don't need. If my Daddy were music or small appliances, the story might be different.
The same is true of sales and marketing alignment. Show me a sales director who is at odds with her marketing counterpart, and I will show you people with different Daddies. Usually, sales' Daddy is revenue, new accounts and customer satisfaction. Marketing answers to the call of opex, brand equity, margin and COGS (cost of goods sold).
Product managers, share the COGS and margin Daddies but may additionally have time-to-market, share-of-market and capex yelling at them to get a haircut. The Keebler Elves in Finance answer to the balance sheet Daddy, and HR gets taken to the woodshed by headcount, compa ratios and turnover.
The reason IT won't build that online billing interface for you isn't because you forgot to give them some of the nifty new logoed travel mugs (though that doesn't help); it's because their Daddies are software release deadlines, a user license cap and getting the payroll processed.
The trick to alignment with colleagues is not to make someone else like or care about your Daddy, but to find a few Daddies in common. I would suggest the same is true of your suppliers. We've all seen agency relationships go horribly sideways when the marketers wonder where the budget all went and the agency can't seem to find its CLIOs. Different Daddies at work.
Speaking of suppliers, Daddy-sharing is a pretty powerful tool for your own sales squirrels to use. Good sales people will understand their customers' Daddies as a matter of course, and will sell to them. Maybe instead of positioning around something like TCO (total cost of ownership), which is really your customer's Daddy, you should align with customers on a mutual Daddy like the number of support calls per quarter or days to implement the product.
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