Doug Kleinsmith On The Overlap Between Marketing & Business Management

Doug Kleinsmith is a marketing and business management professional living and working in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work and success are proof that you don’t need a college degree to have an impact. Being self-employed for the last 35 years, Doug Kleinsmith has built multiple successful marketing businesses with more than $1 million in total sales. He has trained more than 2000 professional salespeople. Doug Kleinsmith was awarded multiple business awards and was considered the top marketing agent for 12 years.

Listening to his background, we realized that Doug Kleinsmith’s expertise must incorporate some admixture of marketing and management skillsets. We asked him about this skill set. We wanted to know how these two categories of discipline compare and how they are different.

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Doug Kleinsmith on the Overlap Between Marketing & Business Management

To build a successful business, any entrepreneur must be competent in both management and marketing, Doug Kleinsmith explains.

Business Marketing Duties

To successfully market a business, one must work with management to move forward on the company’s goals. They must negotiate contracts with vendors, present advertising campaigns to the team, and broadcast campaign messaging over one or more channels. Finally, the business marketing professional must collect and analyze data to measure their success.

Business Management Duties

In business management, duties include overseeing finances, managing staffing duties, and creating or modifying workflows. Like marketing professionals, they must measure and collect metrics for their success and use these metrics to self-report and respond to lessons learned. Management professionals must run or hold meetings with management and employees. Finally, the business management professional must negotiate and approve contracts.

Where Management & Marketing Converge

In each set of duties, we find negotiation, communication, and analytics are all key skills. The manager, like the marketer, must possess expert-level communication skills. While the marketer is likely to be thought of as a more creative type than the manager, the manager must do something that is closely related to marketing. The manager has to “sell” himself as an authoritative and trustworthy leader. He must create a “brand” for his leadership that is both compelling and effective. Most people are happy to be led, but only if their leaders perform well and earn their respect.