Without engineers, nothing gets built. But without marketing, no one knows what to build.
It was in the summer of 1985 when I landed at San Jose airport. I was an engineer. I was picked up by two sales guys I didn’t know. One was tall and gangly, the other was shorter and built for comfort rather than speed. Apart from that, it was hard to tell them apart.
Our mission was to make one of our biggest customers happy. On the drive to the customer’s facility, the sales guys briefed me on what had gone before. They had all the details at their fingertips; well, in their logbooks. Until that time, I had no idea that salespeople kept logbooks; I thought that was an idea we engineers had come up with.
As a result of their detailed briefing, once we were ensconced in a conference room and introductions had been made, I was able to say things like, “Dr. Strangelove, on the 32nd of Blartuary, you asked how to model nonlinear nurtle-effect dynamics. There are two established techniques…” The upshot was a very happy customer. I looked like a hero, and I ended up with a much greater appreciation for the value salespeople brought to the table.
But I fear I’ve jumped ahead of myself…
When I was young and foolish, I had no idea of the importance of marketing, public relations (PR), and sales. To be honest, I was only vaguely aware of what marketing and PR actually did. I sort of assumed they were much the same thing. The problem is that, even today, the founders of many high-tech startups tend to think the same way, which means they are almost certainly in for an unpleasant surprise in the not-so-distant future.
Join me, if you will, on a trip back in time (cue special sound and light effects). It’s OK, you can open your eyes. We’ve arrived at our destination. It’s the mid-1970s, and I’m a student at Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) in Yorkshire, England.
My BSc was in Control Engineering (now called Systems Engineering), combining a solid mathematical foundation with the design and control of electrical, electronic, mechanical, hydraulic, and pneumatic systems (don’t ask what I did in my spare time).
All I’d ever wanted since I was a young sprog was to be an engineer (or an artist or a famous explorer). While I was slogging through my degree, I would daydream about the day following my graduation when someone (mayhap a pretty young lady at a party) would ask, “What do you do?” And I would draw myself up to my full height, take a deep breath, and say (in rolling, resonant, measured tones reminiscent of a young James Earl Jones), “I… am… an engineer,” after which, I fully expected to bask in gasps of admiration. It probably won’t surprise you to discover that I’m still waiting to hear any admiring gasps.
The point (yes, of course, there’s a point) is that I thought engineers were the most important people in the universe. After all, without engineers, salespeople would have nothing to see and the marketing and PR groups would have nothing to… well, do whatever it was they did.
It simply never struck me that each of these groups would feel much the same way about their own roles in the world. From the salesperson’s point of view, for example, if they didn’t make the sale, then there was no point in the engineers building it in the first place. It took me a long time to realize that we were all metaphorically perched precariously on a four-legged stool. Engineering, marketing, PR, and sales each form a leg. Remove any one of them, and we all end up sprawled on the floor looking sad and pathetic.
So, what changed my mind? I’m glad you asked, or else I would have been obliged to come up with some clever way to introduce this into the conversation.
The first crack in my worldview occurred in the mid-1980s. I was working for a small company in the UK. We’d developed one of the first logic simulators for designing digital integrated circuits (ICs), and this simulator was selling like hotcakes worldwide. Our company had recently been purchased by a much larger corporation in the USA.
I was informed that one of our biggest customers in Silicon Valley had multiple questions about modelling and simulating low-level timing effects. This was long before video conferencing arrived on the scene. Now I come to think about it, even the use of email wasn’t widespread at that time.
So, I was bundled onto an airplane and instructed to sort things out, which is how I ended up with the two sales guys I was telling you about at the beginning of this story.
It was years later, after I’d moved to America and was working for another large engineering enterprise, that I learned the value of marketing and PR, including what these groups actually did.
When I arrived, the company was heavily engineering-centric. I was working in the computer division. The team’s modus operandi at that time was to design and build whatever they thought was a good idea, and then “throw it over the fence” to the marketing and PR groups. The response from those groups was generally along the lines of, “Did anyone actually ask for a refrigerator-sized machine that requires reinforced flooring and comes in an eye-watering shade of ‘Spanking Pink’ or did we just decide the world needed one?”
Eventually, the company hired an expert to take the reins of marketing and PR. Since I was writing copy for brochures, datasheets, whitepapers, and web materials at the time, I had a front-row seat. In fact, this was where I learned that “Marketing” encompasses market research, competitive analysis, pricing strategies, product marketing, and go-to-market planning, while PR is concerned with how the company is perceived by the outside world, cultivating media relationships, amplifying the right messages, and gently steering conversations away from topics best left unexplored.
Suddenly, we went from the engineering group creating awesome products that no one wanted, to marketing telling us which ones to build, PR telling the world about them, and sales fighting rampaging customers off with a stick.
I feel in the mood for a rousing conclusion, so here we go (quickly donning my pontification hat): Engineering is vital. It always will be. Without engineers, nothing gets built. But without marketing, no one knows what to build. Without PR, no one understands why it matters. And without sales, nothing moves from prototype to purchase order.
Whether you’re a two-person startup working out of a garage or a multinational behemoth with a campus the size of a small country, remember the four-legged stool. Strengthen every leg and respect every discipline because when engineering, marketing, PR, and sales work in harmony, you don’t just build products, you build companies (and when they don’t… you don’t).
