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.