Software marketing management dept. – timing matters!
Most early stage software publishers or ISVs (independent software vendors) rightly focus on production (software development) and sales in the beginning of their growth curve, and hence seldom have a marketing department from scratch.
I believe this is the right approach: when facing a certain resource scarcity, focusing on generating revenues rather than deploying cost centers is key to short term survival.
On top of this, having none, and no product management & marketing department (handled by the executive committee) in between product development & the sales force allows for better interactions between these two species: sales people are able to better feedback software developers with client needs, helping them understand what their clients want and hedging against market risk. Collateral good: develops and sales guys actually..interact in a rather human manner!
In short, leaving sales people and software developers interact in the very beginning of an ISV growth curve can only be a good thing.
But soon, things get complicated if the management team doesn’t do something about these 2 issues:
i) avoiding sales people to sell functions and releases that are yet to be specified, developed, tested, implemented and deployed. Indeed, sales guys won’t hesitate (often right before bonus time when everybody’s busy) to sell product upgrades that aren’t even in the agenda – which jeopardizes the ISV from a reputational perspective.
ii) integrating competitive items in your product road map. As you grow, your competitors have noticed you and it’s very likely that new function developments won’t exclusively come from customer wills, but also from strategic moves by your competitors. And these will need to be prioritized and integrated: you would better not miss the train, wouldn’t you? Since neither software developers nor sales persons have the time and commitment to do competitive watch, someone has to do it. Right?
The answer to these issues is to bring in a product management (road map) and product marketing (product sheets, white papers, case studies, testimonials + trade marketing often separate from product marketing) group in the middle of the floor, between the sales department and R&D. In my opinion, product marketing management should, when the software publisher reaches a certain point of development (usually break even), become the only interface, a compulsory meeting point, between product developers (R&D) and business developers (sales persons).
To wind up: having a marketing dept. before the company breaks even might slow down your efforts to have your product match market expectations whilst not having a product marketing management dept. after the company breaks even will affect sales in the mid/long run. This goes for software vendors, but I’m pretty certain this way of thinking would perfectly apply to a number of industries other than software.
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.NET (C#), Business Process Management, Business intelligence, Business strategy, ERP, Entrepreneurship, Java, Organization, Project Management, SME, Software, Venture Capital, marketing, operations
A very good post! This is in fact the missing link between being a start-up and becoming a company, I think. And you’re right. It should apply to any industry that is characterised by significant* development times (*: up to a limit. I don’t think it would work for biotech and other multi-year projects).
Thanks Vince. Interesting thoughts on becoming a ‘company’ and stop being a startup – then it’s all a question of definition