The Best Way to Handle Sales Responsibility Within a Marketing Team
How much pressure do you put on your frontline marketing staff to generate sales?
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a big uptick in posts on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and other social media sites from disgruntled social media managers and other marketing staff whose job involves communicating with customers and clients. These posts paint the picture of a lopsided C-suite understanding when it comes to low (read: direct execution) level staff and the lion’s share of the responsibility for converting a follower to a buyer.
Here’s one such post from Annie-Mai Hodge, the founder of Girl Power Marketing, a highly influential marketing presence on LinkedIn and Instagram:
SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR SALES
— annie-mai (@anniemaisocial) November 24, 2023
This recent post has 661 likes, and a similarly themed one she published on LinkedIn two months ago has over 3,100 likes.
This constituency’s frustration is understandable
Consider that we’re at the convergence of:
Gen Z and millennials currently making up 38% of the global workforce — with this percentage set to rise to 58% by 2030. In other words, this is a large and growing bloc of affected workers.
The employee productivity-pay gap has continued its historic growth since the late 1970s. Employees broadly, and certainly within marketing teams, continue to see pay that’s not keeping up with their innovations and productivity gains that help their employers maximize profits.
Due to the end of pandemic-era stimulus money and reduced purchasing power thanks to high inflation for most of the last few years, the U.S. personal saving rate is at a multi-year low of 3.8%. There’s less financial padding moving forward for the average worker, making them more reliant on their salary and benefits to make ends meet in the near term.
Social media posts from frontline digital marketers who feel squeezed have spiked in Q4 — at the same time that the majority of companies that use the calendar year for their fiscal year have been planning for Q1 2024 and beyond. A mid-level or lower marketing employee is more likely now, than at any other time of the year, to hear from his or her boss when it comes to that employee’s performance relative to the revenue coming in from online audiences.
And all of the above in a year where business bankruptcies have risen an alarming 13%. Owners and CEOs are feeling more pressure to perform than ever, which is no doubt seeping into some marketing frontlines through the CMO or marketing director — or directly from the C-suite in smaller businesses where the marketing lead is at the manager or coordinator level.
How to avoid a marketing frontline staff sales pressure death spiral
The simplest (and most common in my experience) solution is to make it so that whoever controls the budget for the marketing function — or marketing/sales if you combine these functions — bears most of the responsibility for generating sales. You could even outline in your CMO or marketing director job description that this role is responsible for 100% of sales, in which case a social media manager who is below this role on the org chart doesn’t need to generate any sales to justify his or her position.
If your business is small enough that your social media manager is the de facto CMO or marketing director — and you can only afford a one-person marketing function — then you should consider promoting this person to a title that reflects a marketing team lead. (This person is likely already handling some director-level tasks, such as website and email strategy development or vendor research and management.) If you make this change, then it’s acceptable to put sales responsibility in this person’s job description.
Here are some other important considerations:
If you employ a Sales function that’s separate from Marketing, put in writing and review in person with both department heads the sales responsibility breakdown for both functions, including the % of sales required for each lead and, if applicable, the % required by lower-level roles. In a Sales department, for example, most if not all sales or business development representatives will have a minimum weekly or monthly quota they need to hit.
If you employ a dedicated webmaster whose duties include designing and implementing website landing pages that convert visitors from social media and other sources to buyers — or even to leads with a defined conversion lifetime value (LTV) — you might consider placing some sales responsibility on this role. After all, your social media staff could be doing yeoman’s work to bring target customers to your website — but if your website does a poor job of keeping the sales funnel going, your conversion rate and overall revenue is going to suffer. In this example, between a social media manager and a webmaster, the latter clearly bears more sales responsibility.
Be conscious of “high-level responsibility creep” in your marketing job descriptions for roles that report to your CMO or marketing director — and cut them from applicable job descriptions when you see them. This creep is often evident when a marketing lead leaves or is fired, and the company needs to have one or more subordinate roles pick up the slack for a while. Over time, high-level responsibilities (including sales) can become baked into lower-level marketing roles if the company in this situation decides it can’t afford to hire a director-level replacement for the employee who exited.
