Do the conversations you have with your marketing guy (or gal) sound more like a negotiation or a collaboration? Lately, I seem to be hearing more marketing conversations that sound more like a negotiation than a collaboration. I know I’m biased, but I believe this is caused by a lack of a marketing strategy. I also believe it is related do doing work on a billable hour basis, but that’s a post for another day.
When I think of a collaborative conversation, I think of synergy. We are both working towards the same goal. The solution we come up with is better than anything we would have come up with individually.
In a negotiation, the goal is to come up with a satisfactory outcome for each of the various interests. The focus is more about what are we willing to give and take away until we come to a solution that we can both live with.
A strategy gives us a common goal to collaborate around. If gives us hypotheses we can test. It helps us helps us come up with creative solutions rather than creating something that is good enough to check an item off of our to-do list.
Listen to your next marketing conversation with the ear of an impartial third party and decide if it sounds more like a negotiation or a collaboration.
