Do You Have the Best Marketing Team in Place?

Do you have the best marketing team in place for a successful year? Each year, B2B CMO’s are being asked to contribute more to the revenue goal. This can’t happen if the marketing team is complacent with a mediocre marketing strategy. Your success is directly related to your marketing strategy and your team.

SBI’s research shows only 29% of marketing leaders have a comprehensive marketing strategy. These 29% have contributed significantly to their company’s revenue goal. What is common in their marketing strategy is outlined in the report here. It’s called, “How to Increase Marketing’s Contribution to 2015 Revenue“. The outline contains 6 major steps to building a comprehensive marketing strategy.

I recently wrote about the 4^th step called “Org” in the report. This describes how to organize the optimal marketing department structure. It will give you a good understanding on how to build your marketing organization. A key component is assessing your team. Specifically, how do you assess talent to ensure you have ‘A’ players in each role? The answer is:

1. Complete a review of your team’s competencies
2. Identify a complete list of competency requirements for each role
3. Place those that qualify for each position into those roles

When you have completed the assessments, it’s common to have open spots. This happens when you don’t have a role and no staff members who fit that role. Also, you may have legacy team members who are assessed and don’t fit any role. Next, determine if those without spots have the ability to obtain the skills required. If they don’t, you need to bring in new marketing talent. To help you get started, below are 15 examples of individual marketing competencies. Use these to help build your list of competencies for each role.

1. Cost Justification – Understanding and presenting cost justification methodologies relevant to Marketing Programs & Campaigns. Measuring the return on marketing investments.
2. Lead Management – Ability to explain the process & requirements of generating inquiries, MCLs, MQL, & SQLS. Explain the importance of content, BPMs, and buyer personas in that process.
3. Convert Strategy to Tactics – Development of marketing related tactics. Linking corporate strategic goals to customer-facing solutions. Developing Account Based Marketing plans for strategic accounts. Identifying implementation tasks. Providing guidance to sales and deploying marketing tactics that tie back to the customer BPMs
4. Judgment/ Decision-Making – Thinking and decision-making while under time or emotional pressure. Weighing conflicting goals of company and customer. Exploring multiple possible outcomes for a key decision. Assessing risk, return, and likelihood of events. Peer reputation inside the company for judgment.
5. Conceptual Ability – Thinking in abstract concepts. Requiring comprehensive list of instructions to take action. Applying concepts. Developing new ideas from skeleton concepts. Conceptualizing problems and possibilities. Producing solutions from vague ideas.
6. Creativity – Developing solutions to problems that defy easy resolution. Finding solutions to pressing problems. Capturing ideas to aid in out-of-the-box thinking. Brainstorming. Producing unique work that has a substantive impact. Developing visual images and multi-media objects that affect sales campaigns.
7. Strategic Skills – Using methodologies to spot and exploit opportunities in account positioning. Understanding and adopting marketing strategic goals. Articulating customer value propositions. Linking solutions via marketing content to the persona problems.
8. Leading Edge – Leading peers in knowledge acquisition. Adopting new marketing strategies and tactics. Integrating new ideas from marketing industry experts. Developing and/or modifying marketing tools. Sharing ideas with group/team members. Known for providing thought provoking customer content.
9. Education – Investing time and effort in personal development and professional education. Leveraging academic pedigree. Self-educating on customer’s business environment. Applying learnings from sales reps, customers, and VOC programs. Possessing thought leadership in business and personal settings.
10. Resourcefulness – Demonstrating resourcefulness when faced with challenges that defy easy solution. Utilizing internal and external resources to advance marketing campaigns. Leveraging champions (sales or customers) to address challenges. Pulling together customer-centric marketing solutions.
11. Organization/ Planning – Planning time; separating productive vs. non-productive time. Reconciling conflicting high priority commitments. Managing time to complete ‘A’ priorities before ‘B’ and ‘C’ ones. Balancing professional and personal schedules. Meeting deadlines. Managing meeting times. Adapting to customer and prospect schedules
12. Adaptability – Demonstrating flexibility to changing circumstance in marketing campaigns. Accommodating different views and guidance. Functioning in work environments of frequent change. Accepting approach of others even though different than your own. Accepting and accommodating unexpected environmental or corporate initiative changes.
13. Team Player – Engendering a sense of unity among peers. Displaying selflessness in who takes credit for accomplishments. Using words of affirmation. Building alliances within the company. Proactively sharing best practices with co-workers. Participating in team-building and team motivating activities. Contributing to a strong sense of camaraderie from among support and other sales-related staff.
14. Social Personal Branding – Demonstrates the ability to create and perpetuate a digital brand that portrays expertise. Builds and expands a network of personal and business contacts.
15. Social Prospecting – Using social media to gather intelligence about account and persona that enhance marketing campaigns.

Key Takeaway:

After completing assessments, you should have a clear understanding of the team. Map out your potential gaps on the organization chart. This will show if additional expertise is required. Also, it shows if you need to create individual development plans for team members. Spend time now to ensure you have the best marketing team for the New Year.