As a follow-up to my involvement in the FastTrac – TechVenture series co-hosted by St. Pete College & the STARTEC Accelerator, I am re-posting one of my all time favorites by Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing “Stop Perfuming the Pig“.

Every exec team or wannabe tech founder needs to read this post and ask themselves some tough questions about the role of marketing in their company.

One of the slides in my presentation on Thursday night echoed a quote in Steve’s post “…the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” If more exec teams took this approach earlier in their planning and development efforts, they would avoid a lot of frustration and save a lot of cash.

Most start-up founders who are technical would have no reason to know this, but the business coaches, mentors, angels and the VCs that step in to help them should. All to often, I have seen venture capital folks obsess about hiring a VP of sales for an early stage company while never really understanding the role of that function or the underlying investments that will ultimately determine that person’s (and the company’s) success or failure.

Take the time to understand the role of Marketing, realize that there is a big difference between inbound marketing (product management) and outbound marketing (promotion, press & analyst relations, demand generation, etc.). Invest in getting the product and the business model right and you avoid a lot of very tense discussions in the board room.

As I always say in the StartupMonkey Workshop: Marketing is just corporate sponsored stalking…know your target customer inside and out, go through their trash, talk to their ex’s and make sure that when you pitch your go-to-market opportunity, it is from a position of strength, not wishful thinking.

Don’t get trapped into thinking that you can somehow make your swine divine. If your big idea turns out to be a pig, sell bacon and sausage to people on Atkins. You’ll find that it is far more rewarding to be the guy with the carving knife than the main entree turning slowly on the spit.