Why Product Creators Are the Best Salespeople
Turn engineers and designers into marketers for better impact.
“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.”
Whether to get sales or users, every company has to get their product in front of customers. Marketing is the area of business that describes how to get a product in front of peoples’ faces.
Marketing has become a multi-billion dollar industry, with so-called experts trumpeting newly developed tactics. However, as Seth Godin so simply put it, sales is simply a matter of getting people to see your product. It doesn’t matter how you do it.
Businesses around the globe, especially startups, have fallen into the trap of overcomplicating their sales. Some startups will have their marketing team with twice as many people like their product creation one.
Many startups don’t even need a marketing team. The best way to get the attention of customers is to go all-in on your product.
Build to the customer for easy sales
Peter Drucker is a famous business thinker who spent years improving the efficiency and productivity of important companies. He even received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.
Drucker well understood the importance of advertising and selling in the success of a company, but he said:
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
In other words, marketing without a good product does nothing because anyone who buys the product will be disappointed. A great product with no marketing will be successful because customers will love it and share it.
Startups can recognize this by going all-in on their product and making it effective for customers. Every person in the company should be dedicated to serving the customers what they want.
A perfect example of this is Stripe. They do almost no marketing, but their product is unbeatable for developers. The Stripe management has clearly recognized how important it is for them to focus on their product, and it’s working out well.
Forget finances and marketing
Elon Musk’s opinion on marketing is quite clear:
“The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”
The CEO is the leader of the company and the one who defines the company's culture. In small startups, the CEO is the company. It’s crucial that the chief executive defines the purpose of the company and lead in it.
Many of the companies that fall apart are the ones that focus only on finances. Look at Enron. They had rampant problems with dishonesty, but their failure was brought on by intense focus on revenue instead of providing better quality energy.
Google takes a completely different outlook from Enron. They focus totally on recruiting engineers. Very few people who work there come from financial or business school backgrounds.
Google’s CEOs have almost all been engineers as well. Google recognizes that their financial and marketing success will come if they go 100% in on technological advancement.
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
Company leaders need to trust their product creators to build a product that customers will love. If the marketing department is the one that is convincing people to buy a product, it will never succeed.
Spend on people, not ads
“Starbucks is not an advertiser; people think we are a great marketing company, but in fact we spend very little money on marketing and more money on training our people than advertising.”
Marketing can be a massive cost for unestablished companies. In fact, often it costs too much for a company but they still spend that money.
Even if there is a great product and leftover money, Howard Schultz recommends reinvesting that money into the company instead of spending it on advertising.
Constant improvement with the people in the company can be just as important as investing in the product. If the engineers, designers, writers, and creators aren’t constantly improving, there’s little chance their creations will.
Every spare dime a company has needs to go somewhere. Holding a load of money for a rainy day might be smart for an individual, but it’s deadly for a startup. The best way to store that money is by turning it into advancement for the people in the company.
Brand yourself by constantly pushing content
Legendary shooter Ray Allen made a name for himself in the NBA by hitting shots that no one else could. He has also learned how marketing yourself can be done most efficiently:
“You don’t need a corporation or a marketing company to brand you now: you can do it yourself. You can establish who you are with a social media following.”
If you’re a creator who works on your own, you still need to recognize that marketing should not be the focus. Your products must be the priority at all times.
Ray’s advice shows that you can use social media to market yourself and share your content in small ways. For example, if you’re a YouTuber, use Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn to share snippets of your content and refer people back to your channel.
Social media is a great interface to market yourself as an individual because you can show your content in a limited way and encourage people to learn more.
Sales should be simple and effective
CEOs can essentially be dumped into two buckets: businesspeople and engineers. People like Elon and Mark Zuckerberg are engineers. Gary Vaynerchuk is a businessman and sales genius.
Richard Branson doesn’t fit into either of these buckets. He’s probably best described as a genius visionary who can do everything. Branson provides solutions to common problems, but his marketing strategy is also brilliant. He says,
“When we launched a new company, I reviewed the ads and marketing materials and asked those presenting the campaign to read everything aloud to test the phrasing and concept. If I could grasp it quickly, then it passed with muster. We would get our message across only if it was understandable at first glance.”
Basically, Branson is the final test to make sure ads put out by his companies show the product in the simplest way possible. He wants people to know exactly what they’re getting.
Every company needs to be like this. As an early startup, marketing should basically be ignored. However, as they get established, small amounts of advertising can be used to clearly and simply show what solution is being offered and how well it works.
Conclusion
Building a great company requires countless failures, long nights, and painful changes. It’s a process that even the greatest entrepreneurs can barely survive.
However, some complications stem from focusing on the wrong things. Businesses are defined by the product they create to solve a massive problem. This is a formula that any successful company follows, and startups that focus on their product over marketing can have much more success.
Marketing is what you do when your product is not good.
Focusing on the product first, developing people second, and finally on advertising allows a company to be more effective in serving customers and having a massive impact.
Even the largest companies recognize that the best marketing comes from the product — its quality, user-friendliness, and ability to solve a global issue.
