Your Two Minute B2B Marketing Assessment
All of you hard-driven and numbers-focused marketers understand the importance of the quantitative side of B2B marketing. If you don’t understand this, you will face the displeasure of your CEO and/or CFO. You measure the number of inquiries, cost per inquiry, number of opportunities, specific media performance, and many other details.
Assuming you don’t try to run your business strictly by spreadsheet, all these types of measurements can be valuable. But they never tell the whole story. There is a qualitative side to marketing that is equally as important. There are a few essential questions you can answer in just a couple of minutes that can let you know if you are headed in the right direction. Best of all there is no data to collect and no spreadsheets to fill out. So take a break from the quantitative side and answer the following:
- Do you feel that your current messaging platform (tagline, brand promise, value proposition and “about us” boilerplate) accurately reflects your company strengths?
- Are you differentiated from your competitors in a way that is understood and appreciated by your prospects and customers?
- Is the relationship between marketing and sales productive, poisonous, or something in between?
- Is everyone in the marketing and sales organizations aligned in terms of messaging, process and reporting?
- Is your lead handoff process well-documented?
- Is the lead flow: strong, good, weak or non-existent?
- Would your CEO say that the marketing department is an asset, liability or something in between?
- Are your key marketing metrics improving, declining or flat?
- Do you have a solid marketing team with key players in every position?
- Are there weaknesses in your marketing organization or game plan that hinder your company’s chances for success?
B2B marketing is tough, but it is even tougher if you fail to do a periodic marketing assessment. The good news is that your marketing assessment doesn’t have to be based on tons of data. So grab a cup of coffee, put your email on hold and spend a few minutes pondering the state of your marketing effectiveness.
Carpe Occasio
