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The second week of July is always a great week to be in Montreal. The annual Jazzfest is wrapping up and the Just For Laughs Comedy festival is just beginning. The city is full of color, music and laughter, brimming with energy and creativity. The curators at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts must’ve felt the vibe, picking a great week to open “We Want Miles”, the first full exhibit dedicated to jazz legend Miles Davis.

“We Want Miles” is divided into eight sections, each marking a point of redirection in Davis’ 40-year career. Davis led a life of consistent reinvention, constantly taking the pulse of the world around him. He always seemed to know the right time to change his style, sometimes drastically, to maintain relevance and make impactful statements about music, society and technology. Miles’ natural talent and artistic intuition was undisputable. But behind those gifts was a man with a plan, focused on establishing a solid working foundation for each new direction, knowing how, where and when to introduce change. 

In my experience, good marketing works the same way. You have to be informed, prepared and unafraid to drive change when it’s necessary. You’ve gotta be like Miles- awake and alert with a finger on the pulse of your business, your investors’ goals and the market. You’ve got to identify and develop core fundamental elements, raising and lowering the levels of each, knowing when one has to play lead and when the others need to keep time.  Let’s strike up the band!

Creating A Rhythm, Setting The Tone
Miles’ core elements were his trumpet, the drums, piano and a stand-up bass. As long as the foundation was strong, Miles could build out his vision. His compositions could become grand in scale- sometimes including whole orchestras- but they were all rooted in these core instruments. The same foundation has to be laid in marketing.  Massive, full-scale campaign efforts that include TV, print, viral, PR- all of them start with solid fundamentals.  If I’m the bandleader, my core instruments are product marketing, brand communication and lead management.

Product Marketing
Your company’s reason for being starts here. What are you selling, why is it important? Product marketing is a core function whose sole existence is to prepare a product to be sold, and equip a sales team to sell the product efficiently. Product marketing is a function that needs to be joined at the hip with sales and your company’s technical team. Product marketing should:

• Develop content like product benefits, competitive positioning, and establishment of value propositions
• Define existing market segmentation, research emerging factors for threats or enablement
• Work with CFO to develop and maintain pricing models
• Draw information about win/loss, competitive differentiators, customer pain points and implementations from customer and prospect base, proving it all out through dialogue with Field Sales teams
• Report quarterly to Executive Team (including board) on status of product differentiator:  what’s working, what isn’t, what changes are on the horizon

Brand Communication
The role of Brand Communication is to take the content generated by Product Marketing and communicate it through the appropriate channels. The primary goal of Brand Communication is to drive leads to the top of the demand generation funnel.  This means creating relevant positioning and calls to action that drive qualified traffic to sales reps or the company website for conversion.  Brand Communication’s responsibilities should include:

• Written and visual direction of brand identity, including logo, packaging, website and written boilerplate materials
• Caretaker of the “script” repeated and/or distributed by sales, employees and executives when talking about the brand, responsibility for keeping “script” current
• Establish brand in marketplace:  public relations, social networking, partnership development (channel, sales partnerships)
• Lead generation and promotional efforts like building targeted marketing lists, direct marketing, sponsorship, partnerships, social networking/online marketing

Lead Management
This is the process of managing inbound leads as they become qualified leads and eventually new customers.  This function is the measurement and accountability mechanism for Product Marketing and Brand Communication.  The key to success here is a well-architected CRM platform that’s easy to adjust quickly and that provides in-depth reporting.  This function should:

• Work with Product Marketing and Brand Communications to establish consistent and relevant sets of qualification data (company size, industry, etc)
• Review and catalog incoming leads from sales outreach programs for quality, patterns and results- keeping track of how the sales cycle progresses relative to qualifiers noted above
• Architect CRM platform for easy/quick entry and fast turnaround for relevant, metrics-driven reports
• Help grade success levels of efforts like webinars, seminars, partnerships and co-branded events
• Guide process of re-marketing to a non-engaged database of leads

This basic configuration is a lot like what Miles started off with.  The Product and Lead Management pieces are the drums and bass- establishing the tempo and keeping the rhythm moving.  The Brand Communication piece is the piano and trumpet- playing that catchy, memorable melody that resonates with the target group.  Just like when a young John Coltrane played lead on Miles’ “Kind Of Blue” masterpiece-there are going to be times when one of these functions drives the others.  No matter which of these groups is doing the most work in volume, or even in overall relevance to the business- they have to work together and in concert with sales, technical and even finance in order to have the highest degree of success. 

As time goes by, you’ll get a little deeper and tackle the hard questions- when should which function play lead?  When should you turn the volume up on Brand Communications and down on Product?  In my experience, this really depends on what state of growth your business is in.  There are different investment goals and sales cycles for every industry, but here are some general thoughts: 

• Startup stage:  from $0 in revenue up to $1M (Product 60%, Brand 30%, Lead Management 10%)
• Early stage:  from $1M in revenue up to $10M (Product 50%, Brand 30%, Lead Management 20%)
• Growth stage:  from $10M in revenue up to $30M (Product 40%, Brand 30%, Lead Management 30%)
• Enterprise stage:  over $30M (Product 25%, Brand 35%, Lead Management 40%)

My thought here is that over time, the ideal business becomes more stable from a product standpoint.  The extensions and upgrades of what you’re selling become more natural and take less effort to build and launch.  The sales message and materials settle in to what they need to be.  As the business grows, Brand becomes more important- referenceable customers, building partner ecosystems.  And as any good marketer knows, a clean and stocked database is at the heart of either of those efforts.  Feel free to chime in here if you see things differently.

In the meantime, here’s some classic Miles footage from 1959′s Robert Herridge Theater.  The Miles Davis Quintet is playing “So What” from “Kind Of Blue”, one of the most influential jazz albums ever recorded.  Sit back, pour a Scotch and enjoy.

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