Happy New Year!
I hope you’re enjoying some additional time with friends & family today, and getting ready to hit it hard again starting tomorrow.
I expect many of you have already written your 2014 sales and marketing plans, and hopefully have attached some specific & measurable objectives to those.
These recommended resolutions for B2B sales & marketing professionals aren’t meant to be immediately measurable, but rather guidelines for driving, defining and focusing your execution in the New Year.
For Marketing:
- Embrace revenue responsibility
- Cut the 10-20 percent of your budget that isn’t performing (at least quarterly)
- Create a “lab” environment to constantly test new ideas, channels, tools and more
- Commit the resources to truly feed your content engine
- Recognize that you cannot succeed without a partnership with sales management and/or sales operations
- Obsess about reporting and attribution/causability of your effort (even when tracking isn’t easy)
- Create an environment for continual learning & sharing among your entire team
For Sales:
- Focus on increasing active selling time across your team
- Ensure all messages, tools, processes, etc. are rooted in buyer behavior, needs and tendencies
- Measure and prioritize outcomes as more valuable than activities
- Partner with marketing to drive consensus for qualified lead and opportunity definitions
- Dedicate resources and time for continual training & best practice sharing across the sales team
- Invest in social selling – make it a priority as soon as possible
