During difficult times, what is the first thing that we hear? Let us cut down on spending, and who are the first candidates for that? It predominantly is advertising and marketing, and surprisingly it is interchangeably used in many IT services companies. This can actually work for big players who have loads of legacy revenue coming in, and aren’t too concerned about getting additional business as opposed to retaining their existing business. These big players look at marketing as an equivalent to branding and advertising and not beyond that; they don’t think marketing in terms of lead/demand generation and are primarily sales driven. Smaller and medium enterprises trying to emulate these bigger players, would do so at their own peril.  

Honestly, now I see that SMEs take marketing pretty seriously. Few years back, people use to recruit high-value, highly paid sales resources in the market place (which invaribly use to be north america) and they kept bringing business.

No. of Sales People X Individual Targets = Revenue Targets of the company

This simple math use to be the strategy of many organizations and they did not realize the shortfalls of this model. During these extraordinary times of credit crunch, business just doesn’t exist and these sales resources aren’t able to bring the desired revenues into the organization. Hence, these companies do away with these top-heavy resources and then it becomes a struggle for them to cope with the situation that new business is not coming in at a pace that they are used to.

Primary problem here is that they don’t have a well-oiled marketing function that can bring predictability to business and the revenue projections. These SMEs now have started realizing the importance of this function and are putting in place a process, and effectively the function to make rains for the organization.