What Your Marketing Team Should Be Doing

Most of the mid-sized companies I have worked with have been on the B2B side of things, and I am always curious as to the reasons why the management team feels that they need to amp up their marketing effort.

Common responses I hear are: we need a better web site, we need to start sending out email newsletters to customers, we need to do a better job at PR, our sales collateral is really not that good, we need to do a better job at advertising, we need to do a better job telling people who we are, our competition does a good job marketing and we don't.

"What's interesting is that the reasons dance around the ultimate purpose of a company's marketing team: drive qualified leads to the sales channel."

What!? What about the web site and the email marketing and the advertising and the branding and the sales brochures and the trade shows and the PR? All of those initiatives are just different ways of ultimately getting a qulaified lead into the sales channel - be it distributors, direct, dealers, or an online shopping cart. Some initiatives may be the right approach for a target market and customer, some may not.

Marketing primarily focuses on the front end of the selling process and has four key goals:

1. Establish the company or product brand in the mind of a prospect
2. Help the prospect learn more about the brand
3. Convert a prospect into a qualified lead for sales to pursue
4. Reinforce the buying decision so a customer becomes a prospect for a repeat sale

There are many layers under each of these four marketing goals, that's what makes marketing so interesting and ever changing. All of the elements in a company's marketing mix should be integrated to work towards accomplishing these four goals. Ultimately though, a marketing team should be delivering qualified leads to the sales team - be they potential new customers or repeat customers.

If you are currently on a marketing team then ask yourself how you're doing against these goals. Review your project list and ask yourself how each project will ultimately lead to a lead. If you struggle with the answer, then maybe you could focus on something else that will ultimately convert a prospect into a revenue generating customer.

If you are the management team, ask yourself how your marketing group is performing versus these four goals. Are they focused on the right area, is there more they could be doing, are they doing well and should be given the resources to expand their efforts?

Resources are limited, make sure they are focused on the right goals.

What Would Woody Do?

I enjoy the humor of Woody Allen, always have. Though as a kid I could not understand how Annie Hall beat Star Wars for best picture in 1977.

One of the best quotes attributed to Woody Allen is also one that every successful sales person should take to heart:

"80% Of Success Is Showing Up"

Think about it, if you are not showing up and talking with your customers then who is? Who is finding out if their buying needs have changed in the last three months? Who is getting to know the buyer and connecting on a personal level, establishing trust and credibility? Who is getting into your pocket and taking your commission?

Your competition, that's who.

This sounds simple enough, but when the economy went into the tank at the start of the Great Recession, many managers at mid-sized companies made the mistake of cutting back on their travel budgets. Times are lean...customers aren't buying any way...email, conference calls, and webinars will work just as well. These are nice but short sighted thoughts. As a sales trainer colleague of mine is fond of saying, "Sales is a contact sport." How true.

Email, conference calls, and webinars do not take the place of looking a buyer in the eye on their turf. Recently I was planning a trip to see a major buyer and had the customer say to me, "Bob, we are not going to buy anything this year. I guess you'll won't be coming out to see us." On the contrary! They have been a cornerstone of our business in the past and will be in the future. I'll let my competition save their travel pennies now so I can pick up the sales dollars later.

If you've not been out to see your customers, then get up and go! With the recovery starting and business beginning to thaw, you must be meeting your customers face to face and positioning you and your company as the right partner for their future growth.

Before the week is out, look over your core customers that were purchasing in 2006 and 2007 - over the past 18 months have any players changed or left the account, how have their purchases been for 2008 and 2009 compared to the previous two years, what are their buying plans for 2010 and 2011...are these the same plans they had just three months ago? What has changed at your company that you can tell them about in terms of your products, personnel, organization, or markets?

Stop reading and take action. You can either choose to sit behind your desk or you can stand up, get out, and show up.

Status Of The Status Quo

"That's just how we do it."

Yep, a great killer to innovative thinking - hiding behind the status quo as if the way we do business was handed down from a burning bush on the side of a mountain. Volumes have been written on this subject, but I am still surprised that this thought along with the ever popular "the system made us do it!" are still allowed to kill creative thinking. Especially in mid-sized companies that should still be nimble enough to know better.

I have found that when faced with offering an alternative to the status quo, just keep it basic and use three simple steps: Analyze, Identify, and Overcome.

1. Analyze the idea or concept - are there facts, figures, and information that may paint a different story than the tribal knowledge of the status quo
2. Identify potential solutions and their barriers - how else can we approach this issue and what stands in the way of implementing our new approach
3. Overcome the barrier and move forward - try it and see if it works. If not, switch gears and try something else

As you try different approaches keep in mind that if you are going to fail, then fail fast. This eliminates solutions that won't work in practice, and allows an even better approach to be pursued.

Here's an real world example with the issue being parts consolidation:

"We can't eliminate published options because we get orders for them. If we didn't, then they would not be on our Price Sheets."

Analyze the concept - we seem to have 15 options that all accomplish the same thing. Do customers really want 15 options our would 2 work better? Looking at hard sales numbers, 12 options account for only 2.5% of our volume over the past 5 years.

Identify potential solutions - we can eliminate all 12 options and push customers into the remaining 3, thus eliminating 80% of the option codes (and parts carrying costs) in this category. Sales may not be happy with this approach, though, and Order Entry will have to rework the pricing sheets, while IT may have to do some work on the ordering system to update the changes.

Overcome the barriers - after talking with key players in Sales, Order entry and IT, they are good with making the change because fewer options means fewer opportunities to make front end errors - a little work now will pay off with less work down the road.

Fail Fast - we soon learned that 2 of the options we eliminated are tied to either a specific customer or a different product line, so we will add them back into the mix.

Final tally: consolidation of 15 part numbers into 5. Seems we can eliminate published options after all.

Won't You Gimme Three Steps

We've all been there. Sitting around a conference table. Talking about an issue that needs to be resolved. Feeling good about how the problem has been identified. Kicking around possible solutions. Spending an hour (or several) of our work day focused on the topic.

And nothing happens.

Sound familiar? I have found that management teams are very good at identifying problems or opportunities in their organizations. The challenge is not the problem identification or coming up with solutions, but rather the problem lies in the implementation of the solution. This is one of the most basic skills sets that a project manager must bring to his or her team - getting folks to get things done.

Here's a suggestion.

"With all due respect to Lynyrd Skynyrd, at your next meeting before everybody walks toward the door and back to their jobs, list three steps that you or the team will take in the next 48 hours to move the team's idea forward. "

Just gimme three steps that move the needle from talking to doing. Put a reminder for two days later on in your Blackberry or on your calendar. Then, follow up so you hold both yourself and your team accountable for the three steps you've committed to.

You'll be surprised what will get accomplished.

Nothing Kills Success Like Success

What tends to kill innovation and success in most mid-sized companies? Success.

While there are superstars out there who can lead their organizations to year over year innovation and performance, for most small and mid-sized companies, having the gumption to actually change what is currently working is, in the minds of most management teams, risky.

This leads to very real management discussions along the lines of, "If everything is going along well and we are leading our industry, then why on earth should we innovate or change?" Sadly, I have seen this scenario played out numerous times in companies. Leaders in their perspective markets who were slow to see their markets, customers, suppliers, or competitors changing, having been enamoured by their own success.

"Eventually their "current success" turns to "past success" and organizations are forced into change, having squandered their position of strength."

If the Great Recession has taught us anything it is that the business environment we navigate can and will change rapidly. There is hardly an industry that was not affected by the downturn and that now faces a brave new world of opportunities and risk. Management teams, once comfortable in their company's performance, have been forced into the unfamiliar territory rethinking their business, channel, or product models given their new business landscape. Surveying the Recession's aftermath, many good companies have lived to fight another day, many have not.

Look at your company's current position then ask yourself, what assumptions that guided how you approached your industry's market 18 months ago may no longer be real? What advancements over the past 18 months in how you may approach your customers - such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter - could now be used to your competitive advantage? Given the current competitive landscape, is what made your company successful two years ago still valid today? What talent is out there, ready to be plucked, who could help fuel your organization's growth during the recovery?

And as I ask, what three steps will you take this week to put your thoughts into action?