When my friend the sales director blew me off for lunch the other day, I wasn’t surprised. “I’m really sorry but someone just spotted a product manager on the fourth floor,” she gushed like a drunk birder. “I need to corner that slippery little *^#@?%, brush the Cheetos dust off his shirt and get him in front of my customer’s IT director this week or they won’t buy the upgrade”. Sorry as I was to miss lunch, I was reminded that watching sales people chase subject matter experts is one of the more amusing dynamics of the B2B workplace.
I’m not talking about sales engineers or solutions consultants or product marketing managers here. If you are lucky enough to have such creatures, you know that sooner or later, there are questions or customers that simply demand a greater level of expertise or seniority. If you don’t have this intermediate layer of people who know stuff then your subject matter experts are likely being hunted to the brink of their own sanity.
The problem is a simple one of supply and demand. For every subject matter expert, be they a product manager, legal expert, chief economist, senior analyst, creative director or the lady who knows how to fix the billing system, there are dozens of customers who want to meet them, and an equal number of sales people for whom the world will end if that doesn’t happen.
The problem is, nobody told the subject matter experts. Indeed, if they have “talking to humans” anywhere in their job descriptions, it’s usually scrawled in yellow coloured pencil next to the bit about not stealing paper clips. Which means that it’s not just expertise in short supply, but a willingness to share it.
It would be nice to think that all marketing has to do is start a pool about which sales people will capture which subject matter experts but this is actually our problem too. Our job is to make our company credible, or at least less irrelevant than our competitors. Credibility is built on expertise and expertise, dear friends, is built on subject matter experts.
Marketing, in general, has better access than sales to subject matter experts. Partly because we don’t often make them put on a tie and partly because we, like they, are mostly sedentary and likely to encounter them at the watering hole and strike up a friendship. Which is why I think we have a duty to stop toying with sales and help them develop a catch-and-release program that works for everyone.
If we do it right, we ought to be able to entice our Subject Matter Experts at Rest (SMEARs) out of hiding, find them meaningful ways to support sales and marketing and return them unharmed to their day jobs without upsetting anyone.
It all begins with understanding the subject matter experts available in a given ecosystem and what their role in the larger picture ought to be. Let’s stereotype:
Hermit Crabs
These dwellers of the dark may have the social acumen of a raisin but are deeply interesting to other technical people. They are often product managers, lead developers, QA people, logistics experts or actuaries. The good news is they are generally brilliant; the bad news is, they don’t usually hesitate to call everyone in the room, including customers, stupid and then spend an hour demonstrating it.
Wind-up Evangelists
At the other end of the spectrum we have highly social, gregarious “evangelists”. Usually people with enough technical chops to be credible and enough social skills to be functional. If you look closely, you can see the place to insert the wind-up key for hours of polished testimony. If you are lucky enough to have one of these, and it’s actually their job, you need to be prudent in their deployment lest you burn them out or find the limit of their credibility. A warning here: some evangelists are actually self-appointed and are avoiding a much less interesting real job by gallivanting about the country speaking at conferences. Sooner or later they are caught and many simply disappear.
Demo Dudes
These are the people who not only did very well at engineering or law school, but managed to have friends that were visible to others. We find them in technical roles like human factors design, data analysis, supply chain optimization, financial modelling and tax policy. While not as articulate as their evangelizing brethren, they can nonetheless string together a sentence, put on a smile and natter enthusiastically about something technical. They’ll take a fair bit of abuse and are usually eager to eat with grown-ups, but be warned: they don’t always know their limitations and may end up producing information from an orifice that isn’t exactly media trained.
Irritated Overlords
Sometimes, what our customers or the industry really want isn’t deep technical insight, but an audience with someone senior enough in our organization to matter. Executive vice presidents, presidents and chief-anything-officers are sought after by sales to reassure their counterparts on the client side that all is well and nobody is going to end up doing the I-Told-You-So-Dance on their desks. While most Overlords accept their fate as ambassadors for the organization, they are nevertheless sometimes a little grumpy about having to do it and require rigourous persuasion and preparation to prevent a last-minute bailout.
Next week, we’ll look at how and where we can turn our SMEARs into SMELTs (Subject Matter Experts Liberally Talking).
Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com
jbglad59 says
This, from one of my favourite bloggers; today she’s talking about people like me. Now I can’t decide what I want to be when I grow up! Should I a Hermit Crab, a Wind-Up Evangelist, a Demo Dude or an Irritated Overlord? So many decisions… I liked it so much I shared it on Facebook and LinkedIn.
jbglad59 says
This, from one of my favourite bloggers; today she’s talking about people like me. Now I can’t decide what I want to be when I grow up! Should I a Hermit Crab, a Wind-Up Evangelist, a Demo Dude or an Irritated Overlord? So many decisions… I liked this so much I shared it on Facebook and LinkedIn.
convergenceman says
Very true, very realistic…you perhaps should in your upcoming blogs next tackle why organizations don’t foster this behaviour – i.e. enocurage or foster SMEs to be more enthusiatic and contribute consistently in sales efforts without diruptic their “daily” job.
bizmarketer says
Excellent point on why organizations don’t encourage SMEs to step into the light a little more. Let me ponder it a while and see where it goes. I suspect it ends up in some HR/Legal/PR vortex of doom. But you never know! Thanks for the comment.