One of the challenges that most professional marketing folks have is limited resources. Limited time, limited budget but an UN-limited amount of work to do. Think about it. When it comes to driving sales and improving your business opportunities does anyone really ever say, "That's plenty, go home!" There's always one more thing to do, one item to cross of your list and then tomorrow's another day. That's a marketing truism that has held true no matter where I've worked.
So why the need for trust? Because the marketing discipline is one more step disconnected from the customer versus Sales or Product management. Sales people are on the phone or visiting their customers directly so it's easy to measure what they do. Product managers should also be directly engaged with their customers to identify upgrades, feature and products that will bring value to their customers so easy to measure their value there. Product marketing folks (and marketing in general) sit one level further away from the customer in between sales and product management. So it's more challenging to directly measure results and develop KPI's (key performance indicators) that accurately measure marketing impact.
So back to that trust story. If your sales group or product management don't trust the marketing department or efficacy of their programs and efforts, guess what happens? They start asking for more "concrete proof" of your marketing work. Which means finding semi-accurate measures (or proxies) that tell your marketing efficiency story. But as you can guess, those numbers are never that easy to pull together and unless your have a great CRM tool and a way to automate those reports, you're digging up information from multiple sources, slamming it into a spreadsheet and then creating a purty Powerpoint to present to the team. Sigh. And that of course, is a LOT of work. Every single bit of time spent pulling up metrics and reporting back to the team to reassure them means you have less time to work on outbound activities and campaigns to influence and engage your customers.
When your business is in good shape and you've got well-differentiated product or service, the above scenario is not an issue. But if you're on a struggling product line, you can guess that fingers will get pointed back to marketing. It can be easier to do that then fix a product or add an additional salesperson to the team. So as a professional marketer you HAVE to maintain that trust with both teams to ensure you'll be given the latitude and time to get your work done the way it needs to be done because time is limited.
I've been down that rat-hole where trust is lost and you can end up in a death-spiral of trying to show the efficacy of your efforts which then puts more pressure on you and your outbound activities. The key is to keep your teams engaged and aware of your marketing activities and be transparent about their impact. While you can not measure every single bit of your work, there needs to be enough hard metrics to show your value and impact. Or maybe you can blow enough hot air and use words with lots of syllables to assuage their concerns. Me, I'd rather just show the Product Management team and Sales team how effective I am. Because even if you're a marketing professional, you're better off spending more time marketing to your customers than marketing to your internal teammates.
