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In the last seven years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with, talking to, and working alongside some really terrific people across a variety of companies. I’ve worked with solo entrepreneurs, startup companies, Fortune 500 giants with titanic budgets, and SMBs with tight pursestrings and big dreams.

Across all of these situations and environments, there’s one thing in common: about 9 times out of 10, when I ask about marketing, I usually end up having a conversation about “brochures” and “swag and tchotkes.” In other, guarded moments with people outside of marketing (say, in Sales, or IT), conversations about the marketers usually devolve into three things:

• They’re helpless when it comes to technology.
• They couldn’t identify a lead if one showed up with a wheelbarrow full of money.
• They’re only good at printing up brochures and hiring booth babes for the convention.

All of these statements (and many more like them) are patently unfair, of course–but let’s face it guys, marketing practitioners have always had a bit of a self-esteem problem. We know we’re among the first to get the axe once bad times roll around–but we’re not willing to do the hard work of establishing ourselves as grownups at the revenue table. We accept the fact that our activities cost money–but we don’t take credit when all of our communication efforts and follow-ups turn into a plausible lead in the pipeline (and later, a sale). We know that we’re not experts in all the technical things required to feed a Web 2.0 effort, but then again we don’t fight like crazy for the kind of headcount we need to stay competitive.

Why is that? I don’t know. But it’s got to end. Marketing is really the only way that companies stay alive. Yes, sales brings in the money, but if sales had to draw their attention away from selling to communicating (yeah, that really long tail of informing, educating, empowering and talking to the customer [in print, online, at events, via webinars, white papers, case studies, conference calls.....etc etc etc] way before and during and after the sale is made) then you would see sales plummet….and in fact, there would be other second-order effects because really, you hire a salesperson to sell, not to figure out messaging strategy or build web sites or write white papers. They would do these things so badly that they would not only be selling less, but screwing up the fewer sales they would get.

With that in mind, read a few blog posts below and assert yourself.

• Earn a seat at the Revenue Table, Part 1
• Earn a seat at the Revenue Table, part 2

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