thefunnel

A recent blog citing research done by ISTMA claims that an average sales person only spends about 40% doing direct selling. The rest is consumed by non sales, travel and administrative tasks, of which according to the research 25% is marketing related activities. A good marketing organization could therefore “create” 25% more selling time, which at least in theory translates to 25% more revenue, if all of it is used as effectively. How can marketing provide value add? I’ve come to conclusion a long time ago that at least the following needs to be considered. Providing alignment, direction (strategy) and training, lead generation, sales enablement tools creation, sales process automation and account planning intelligence. Recently I added a few things to my list. The first one is mindshare. For sales people that have many things to sell, how do you create mindshare? The other one which is the most difficult one is passion. Passion is the driver and the customers can feel it. It cannot be learned, but it can be experienced.

As an “outcome based”  marketeer it can sometimes be hard to let go of the metrics, but quite often this is exactly what is required to be successful. Activity based marketing versus outcome based. We all like to only do the things that are measurable, but what if the organization doesn’t really care about the metrics or strategies? Impact versus content. Someone once said that you’re only as good as your last power point presentation. Well, it depends. Sometimes you need to step in /up and  do the “right” things, even if they are not “perfect marketing things” or measurable, and make sure the fundamentals are covered. Things like does the sales people have the tools they need to be successful, never mind that you show up on google search or not.

Most B-2-B marketing is all about the marketing contribution to achieve a business objective. Often there’s a high emphasis on easy to measure direct contributions such as collateral (brochures, catalogs, etc.) leads, visits, responses or new names, and not much weight is given to marketing “influencers” such as brand equity, awareness, loyalty, etc. (although these can be more valuable for the success of a business in the long run). The reason for this is simply because some things are easier to measure than others, and the short term focus of many companies leads to a very tactical approach. For many marketers, digital marketing has been great, with more measurable things, but the marketing contribution problem still remains, because yes there are more things to measure, but yes they are still very tactical or activity based rather than based on a real outcome. Why am I writing this? Here’s why. The bigger problem as I see it is that the business environment is changing and most of the “generic and measurable” marketing contributions are showing a diminishing return. For example: email marketing response rates are going down, trade show participation is down, most companies are catching on to search and web marketing, so the way in which marketing used to show its (tactical) business contribution is soon no longer being there, and yet, not much emphasis is being put onto measuring the indirect contribution of marketing. What can a marketer do, to avoid going back to be just a servant of sales and a production house for brochures and flyers?