Somewhere this week, an office technology dealership is sitting through its quarterly sales review, and the marketing manager is being grilled, yet again, as to why the new managed IT services line isn’t generating the inquiries that everyone in the room was promised it would.
The marketing person refers everyone to their hastily assembled presentation, showing a slide with website form completion numbers and the trade show badge captures, together with a trend line that the meeting attendees are studying as though the answer to the whole problem might be hiding somewhere inside it.
Sound familiar? Many of us have been in this meeting, right? So how come, since we’ve all watched this movie before, no one in the meeting is asking the more pressing question: Why do we expect the same marketing playbook that sells copiers to work for an IT services business that nobody even knows we’re in?
The answer to that question often is that the decision to push into managed IT services wasn’t made by marketing. In fact, marketing wasn’t even consulted.
The decision was made by the vice president of sales, the CEO, and the COO over the course of an afternoon at an off-site somewhere, as a response to copier hardware margins that have been thinning for years. The marketing department staffers found out about it the same way they find out about most things (i.e. after the decision was made) and were handed a target without having much of a say in the thinking that produced it.
Coming in at the end, being treated as a sales support utility, is indicative of what marketing has become in most reseller businesses. We say we have a marketing function, and we probably think we do. But what we’ve actually got is a promotion function wearing a marketing job title, which is a very different animal indeed.
To be effective, the marketing function needs to be given an input and level of responsibility which, like the old days, many businesses may view as being the remit of other departments.
Hopefully, we can agree that marketing contributes to what gets sold, what it costs, who we sell it to, and where those buyers can be reached; in which case, marketing’s clear function within the business is far more than churning out websites, trade shows, or tote bags. But if we look at the ‘average’ dealer, the products or services we sell get decided by sales or operations, pricing sits with finance (because finance owns the model it lives inside), and the question of which customers we go after is decided off-site, by the same people who’ll later ask marketing why the inquiries have dried up.
So, what does marketing that earns its place look like? For most dealers, it comes down to getting two things working together: ‘brand’ marketing and ‘performance’ marketing.
Brand marketing vs. performance marketing
Brand marketing is the slow, deliberate work of becoming a name the buyer already has in mind before they need anything. Since brand marketing rarely produces a lead during most quarters, it usually tends to get cut first. An example of brand marketing? Pretty much every Coca-Cola ad you’ve ever seen.
Performance marketing (sometimes called demand generation) is stuff like campaigns, limited-time offers, search ads, and email follow-up sequences. It’s about reducing buying friction, assisting sales, and capturing those buyers who are in-market right now. This is the kind of marketing that produces numbers we can put on a slide, which is why it tends to survive the budget cut that killed off the brand marketing.
But performance marketing, regardless of how well it’s executed, can only catch demand that already exists. When an office manager searches Google or AI for “managed IT services near me,” the campaign they see is competing with a vendor shortlist that’s already formed in their head. The providers they’ll consider are the ones they already recognize, ones a peer had mentioned to them, and/or ones whose name has been quietly accumulating in the back of their mind for a year or more. That long-term recognition, what marketers call “salience,” didn’t happen because of some campaign we ran this week.
Copier hardware dealers, for example, may have decades of accumulated recognition in their territory, the kind of presence that means a procurement officer thinking about replacing their equipment fleet will at least take the cold call. But that recognition doesn’t transfer to IT services, cybersecurity, or whatever other new sales idea we just had. As far as the buyer is concerned, we are a brand-new entrant in a category they already have established providers for, and the underperforming campaign is shouting into a market that has no reason to hear it. We’re asking performance marketing to do brand marketing’s job, which it cannot do, and the sales numbers prove it.
For a dealer established in one area and now pushing into new markets, the practical implication is that a meaningful portion of the marketing budget needs to be spent on activity that won’t show up in this quarter’s inquiry numbers, or next quarter, or possibly even the one after that.
The work of becoming credible in a category where nobody knows us depends on the business, the product, the market space, and buyer expectations. However, as an example, it could look like considered point-of-view content placed on sites and publications the buying community actually reads, speaking slots at the regional events where decision-makers gather, customer stories from the early clients, and a sustained LinkedIn presence from the principal and the senior team that demonstrates an understanding of the buyer’s world rather than just our own. There may be decisions to make on pricing, in terms of the value we can deliver to the buyer over and above what others can do (or choose not to do). It may be looking at how to make buying from us easier.
The list can be as long as we want, but none of this produces a number anyone can wave at the next quarterly review. It’s the work that makes the eventual campaign actually catch attention, generate interest, and create buyer action when we decide it’s time to run it.
Managed IT ain’t copiers . . .
This also means we should be running two different brand-and-performance mixes, because our copier business and our new business are at different stages of buyer awareness. For the copier line, where the recognition already exists, performance marketing carries a higher share of the budget because there’s an existing market actively considering replacement cycles and we just need to be in front of it. For the new offering, that ratio probably needs to flip. We need to invest more of our budget into the slow work of being known and trusted in a category we’re new to, and (to start with) less into campaigns where we’re still relatively unknown and finding out what we don’t know. Running the same split across both lines (which is what most dealers do because the budget conversation happens once a year at the company level) is often the single most-common reason a sales diversification initiative underperforms.
The two halves must be briefed as a single program, rather than two separate ones, since that’s how they work in the field. The op-ed piece we published in a trade press article needs to have the same underlying point of view that shows up in our LinkedIn posts, the speaker abstract, the customer story, and the demand-gen campaign whenever it’s time to run it. If the buyer encounters our considered analysis of “Where SMB Technology is Heading” in one place and then a generic “Request a Quote Today!” campaign in another, the cognitive imbalance effect means our brand and performance work both end up doing less than they should.
Of course, the first hurdle is getting all of this past the CFO. Brand investment ROI pays back over a horizon longer than the annual budget cycle, but the things it produces (the gradual shift in how the market perceives us) manifest as deals the sales rep didn’t have to discount, growing win rates against category incumbents, and inbound inquiries that arrive organically. Yes, this is harder to measure than performance marketing, and some of the metrics don’t sit well with people from a finance or accounting background. Perhaps a more useful framing is that some marketing investments produce attributable leads, others produce the conditions under which leads become attributable, and any finance director worth their salt should be able to buy into that once the distinction is explained without defensiveness.
However, none of this works if the marketing function isn’t in the room when the sales diversification decision is being made in the first place. That free vacation (sorry, I mean “off-site strategy meeting”) that produced the managed IT services push was the moment when the recognition gap should have been identified, the multi-year nature of the investment understood, and the budget implications worked into the business case rather than discovered later when the disappointing inquiry numbers came in. Marketing being absent from that conversation is what produced the weak quarterly review, and that quarterly review is going to keep happening until the invitee list at the off-site changes.
Which, in the end, is the only sustainable and scalable answer to a problem many resellers are experiencing today. The underlying issue doesn’t get fixed by tweaking a campaign, hiring a new agency, or coming up with a different mix of ad platforms. The brief for the marketing team, and the conversation the dealer principal needs to have with the leadership team, is that marketing earns its keep by being in the room when the decisions get made, doing the slow work of building recognition for the categories we want to be known in, and running the campaigns on top of recognition that already exists rather than in place of it.
For many businesses, this kind of thinking may lead to a review of the capabilities of people currently in the marketing department. But you know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The dealers who do this today will start and continue to take market share from the ones who don’t.
Gee Ranasinha is the founder and CEO of KEXINO, a global SMB marketing agency based in France. Check out Gee’s marketing videos on LinkedIn.
Gee Ranasinha
