Employee's role in marketing

[DayTrader]

Just what is the role of employees in marketing? How do you get your employees to market your products?

[mcfarldr1]

Word of mouth is going to be one of the biggest ways that they can market products without spending money. Maybe if they have a Facebook or Twitter account they can put up a message about something new or exciting coming out. I mean, if they tell only 30 people and then those people pass it along to a few others, the word has been spread.

[DerekS]

Can you put this in a context?

What industry? What product?

[noob]

Just what is the role of employees in marketing? How do you get your employees to market your products?

I think your question more or less should be directed towards how you plan on marketing your company and how employees will fit this role. If you're expecting to hire an employee and then have them tell you how you should market your company, that would be bad. While it is good to have feedback from employees on how things should be done, it should never be the case where they have to tell you how to market your product. You are afterall, the leader. I believe in hiring talented people who know more than you, but at the end of the day, its their suggestions you're taking in and ultimately you making the decisions on what to do (or hiring someone to make those decisions). So unless I misunderstood your question, I think its a clear cut answer. The employee roles are dependent on your business, what it does, and how they can best serve your business by helping market your product as best as possible. Whether those marketing channels will come from will be from you with most likely inputs from them and anywhere else you can get advice from. To answer your question about how to get your employees to market your product, that would essentially be the marketing dept's job or the sales people's job. Again, depends on your company, product, structure, etc... If you can offer more info, I think we can provide better feedback.

[DayTrader]

Thank you for your replies. I have a startup business now, and I'm looking for ways to market my products. I am just curious on how other people manage their employees so well. I mean, what is their secret in making their employees market their products? The employees' actions directly and indirectly affect marketing. right?

[noob]

I can't speak for others but when hiring people, skills is the last thing on my priorities of must hire requirements although it is important. I try to avoid hiring employees that I have to manage or require extensive amounts of micromanaging. The employees I hire for a specific task typically gets briefed on their role, the business, and how the business typically does things. From there, they handle majority of the rest (self sufficient hopefully). Of course from time to time you end up having to make decisions and providing input but on the day to day, you shouldn't really have to manage the employee. If you do, in part, it's almost as if you're doing the job for them and its time consuming and the purpose of hiring someone is to entrust that they will accomplish what they need to do with as little involvement as possible.

Having said that, pages upon pages can be written about how each company's hiring process differs and in particular, what they specifically look for when hiring people. I don't believe there is some magically guaranteed formula but general guidelines base on your business is always a good rule of thumb.

In terms of marketing, I explain specifically what the company does to help grow our business and from there, the employee I hire takes over the role and provides input to expand this. I don't think there is a secret in getting any employee to market the product or market it well. A lot is background knowledge that "you" personally have in marketing a business or marketing for that matter, in part what you learn as you grow, in part what the employee can suggest, and in part their ability for sales (this varies on the individuals and some just have a strong innate ability compare to others).

The best example I can give you was for my last company, the first sales person I hired was a stella sales person (by sheer luck) and we have given him the position of VP of Business Development. This guy pretty much knew everyone. Partly because it was his personality, and not because he's an awesome sales person or marketing person or anything (I actually truly believe his marketing abilities outside of building strong personal relationships sucks hardcore). He just simply has a natural talent for being friends with so many people. This isn't an exaggeration either. Both on the job and after hours, everything from working to going to random places like nightclubs, rap shows, comedy clubs, restaurants, grocery stores, museums, whatever... he would run into someone he knows. It's the strangest thing. And its not even just local, whether in Denver, NY, LA, SF, Seattle, etc etc.. he ALWAYS run into someone he knows. It's the oddest thing I've never seen in my life. And this sort of attribute GREATLY made all the difference in our business. He made massive business connections for our startup and drove tremendous amounts of PR and sales right out the door (strictly through relationships; this isn't a common type of marketing a company utilizes). One example I can give was we launched a new service in July of last year. From $0 revenue on day one, within 3 weeks, he was able to scale to $40k/day in revenue and nearly triple that number within the week that followed. Again, a lot of it due to existing relationships with god knows how many people he's connected with, particularly with our industry.

I got lucky because he was having some bad blood at the company he was working for and we were good friends that have meet that same year. I was mostly following up on how things were going for him and found out he wasn't happy at his current job at the time. I made an offer to pay him a high starting salary and some equity and he was on board. Normally, this would be an extremely difficult type of person to hire. At his old job, he was getting paid $15k/month salary + commissions and when he offered to quit, they offered to double his salary (in case you were wondering how good he was; if paying people for what they're worth means anything). I obviously didn't offer him as much (or anywhere close to that) but in exchange, I gave him equity and he was game.

In your particular case, the best suggestion I can give is define what your key hiring practices are that you look for in ALL employees, and then break down what you want to see in terms of what they can deliver on the per position basis. It is extremely difficult to say there is any one secret to getting employees to market the product for you. If they're a marketing type of person (and hopefully they're passionate about the company and/or product), it should be a cinch. If they're just an employee and have no passion involved, its just a matter of personality and skills at that point. Having an understanding of the industry, general marketing, etc... helps every step of the way.

[DayTrader]

Noob, your post was such an interesting one to read!Thanks=)

I could say I learned a lot from your reply. I agree that success of marketing depends on a lot of factors, and employees play a very important role. As I read your story on hiring that sales person guy, I must say he is really an asset. He's got the personality that attracts customers. He's the type of person I would love to have to work for me.