I recently wrote a blog post titled, Top Three Signs Your Marketing VP Might Be in Trouble. To recap, the warning signs are:
- They Focus on Campaign Creation, Not Lead Generation
- They Don’t Create Compelling Content
- They Fail in Active Engagement
But how about the good or great marketing VPs – How do you recognize and reward these individuals, and most important, keep them on your team? At Fusion Marketing Partners, we work with several outstanding marketing VPs and I have known dozens over my 25 year marketing career. The best-of-the-best display the following traits:
- Relentless focus on results. The bottom line for every marketing professional is the ability to generate the awareness and leads necessary to achieve the revenue goals of the company. All the creativity and cleverness in the world won’t save a marketing VP who can’t feed the sales funnel. Most often, the sales department needs a steady supply of qualified sales leads to make their numbers. Marketing VPs who deliver leads consistently are worth their weight in gold.
- A forward-looking approach to the business. Great Marketing VPs are strong tacticians but they are also highly strategic in their approach to the business. They strive to ensure that the company’s message is relevant not only today but for years to come. They are considered to be company leaders as well as departmental leaders.
- An ability to work well with their sales counterparts. The majority of companies split the functions of sales and marketing because they realize that these two disciplines, while complementary, are very disparate. Good marketers create service level agreements (SLAs) with sales to define qualified sales leads as well as the quantities that will be delivered on a monthly or quarterly basis. They hold up their end of the end-to-end marketing and sales process and they expect their sales colleagues to do the same.
- An understanding of pull marketing. 90 percent of B2B marketing companies can benefit from pull marketing (also known as inbound marketing). Pull marketing is attraction-based and relies on low-cost techniques (including PR, SEO and social media) that get customers to come to you when they need what you are offering. Great Marketing VPs are using pull marketing to generate sales leads and revenue for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to single-person.
These are just four of the traits of excellent Marketing VPs. You can probably add others. I hope you have such an individual guiding your marketing efforts. And if you happen to be a great Marketing VP, I hope your company recognizes and rewards you accordingly.
