What they didn't teach you in Business School: 5 Critical Things Today's Professional Marketer Needs to Master

Today's business schools have come a long way since the day I graduated. The programs are more involved, internships are more prevalent, and the case study programs continue to impress. With all the improvements, I find that today's graduates are still lacking some key skill sets that will ensure their success on the job in years to come. Additionally, professionals that have been in the field for more than five years are also lacking key skills that threaten their job security. In this article, we examine 5 critical things that every professional marketer needs to master.

How to use technology to scale demand generation: There is no questioning that today’s marketing professional is much more tech savvy then previous generations. They can text, blog, engage in social networks, and use the internet in a variety of ways. What they haven’t learned how to do is leverage these technologies to build sustainable revenue streams for their companies. Marketers tend to overuse email at the expense of other channels and miss opportunities to engage with their prospects and customers in a meaningful fashion. Instead of using technology to scale, many marketers spend their days in hand-to-hand combat, performing a variety of key tasks manually. This is very inefficient and slows top-of-the-funnel growth. The first thing marketers need to do is build processes that can source leads from a variety of channels. These processes should include target profile, messaging, scoring, routing, follow-up, management, and disposition. Once these processes are in place, marketers can then select and use technology to drive demand. The most successful marketers leverage an ecosystem to drive a continuous flow of leads. There is no silver bullet. By building a variety of acquisition channels, marketers can more predictably grow their business. Key technological components should include:

Automating Event Marketing, Registration and Follow-Up. This includes webinars and live events.

Implementing website tracking at an individual level to monitor digital body language and build active buyer profiles and personas.

Implementing lead scoring and lead incubation programs to determine sales-ready leads and market to the remaining leads not ready to buy.

Integrating online forms with CRM systems and developing automated form handling routines in addition to the auto-responder.

Using RSS to syndicate content and drive traffic to the website.

Building or sponsoring specific social networks.

Hosting an active blog on the corporate website.

Integrating website tracking with online and offline demand generation programs.

Leverage streaming video and audio as part of podcasts or viral campaigns. This is just a starting point, but the above items should be considered a staple in every marketers demand generation arsenal.

How to develop a sustainable and healthy relationship with sales: This topic has gotten a lot of press over the last year. One of the biggest reasons sales and marketing are not aligned is because they are not measured on the same things. A sales team is always measured on revenue and thinks short term – this month, this quarter. A marketing team is typically measured on leads, programs, or softer metrics and has a much longer time horizon – 6 months, 1 year, etc. To ensure a better working relationship, there are several critical things every marketer needs to do:

Ensure you are measured on revenue, not on leads. As long as you continue to be measured on your spending, you and your department will be considered an expense. In business, expenses get cut, investments get nurtured. Get your team to be measured on revenue and this will significantly change your alignment with sales. Once you are being measured on the same things, your approach to marketing will be completely different. You won’t think about how many leads you drove this quarter, you will think about whether your programs helped make the quarterly sales target.

Have a shared and written definition of what constitutes a qualified lead. You can deliver all the leads you want to sales, but they will continue to reject them as long as you have different ideas about what a lead is and isn’t. Set up a working session with the sales team and determine what constitutes a qualified lead. Examine both traditional measures such as budget, authority, need and timeline. Also take a look at online behavior – content downloads, webinar attendance, key page views. Develop a scoring matrix around these components and ensure that you deliver only those leads to sales that meet these criteria. Revisit the matrix on a quarterly basis and adjust as needed.

Set up working teams. Instead of having siloed functions, pair up field marketing with the regional sales team and give them a shared goal. It is amazing what will happen when they have to work together instead of pointing fingers at the other.
Reporting on Marketing Success in Financial Terms: Remember those accounting classes we took in school – the ones we slept through while we anxiously looked forward to the creative ones? Guess what? The awards we have been giving each other over the years for our creativity don’t count anymore. Today’s board wants to know how we are spending the company’s money. It is no longer sufficient to report on leads, clickthroughs, impressions, or campaign awards. Today’s marketing professional needs to be financially savvy. They need to know lead to customer conversion ratios, return on marketing spend, lifetime value of a customer, net present value of a lead, and a variety of other business metrics that indicate how well marketing is managing the company’s money to grow revenue. It’s time to dust off that textbook and get back to basics. Your job security depends upon it.

Develop strategies, to get, keep and grow your customer base: It is easy to focus on programs that bring in new customers – that typically gets most of your budget. But what about your customers? We have all heard the adage, it is easier to keep a customer than get a new one – but is it? If you are not allocating more than a token amount of your budget to service your customers, they could be looking elsewhere. Many companies have a variety of products and services that they want to sell to their installed base to build wallet share and improve loyalty. With all the talk about Net Promoter and the clear correlation between customer loyalty and long-term profitable growth, it is essential that today’s marketing professional implement programs that address customers at every stage of their need cycle. There a number of methods that can be invoked here, from customer advisory boards to using technology to deliver automated cross-sell/up-sell campaigns, today’s marketer can reach their customer and grow the long term value of the relationship. It just takes a focused effort.

Understand and Align with the Customer Buy Cycle: I have lost track of how many professional sales training courses I attended over the years. They all prescribed one process or another for controlling the sales cycle and getting in synch with your customer. These methods worked for a long time until the Internet came along. Now, your customers have the power to initiate the buy cycle, long before you even know about it. We are not in control of the sales process. The customer is in control of the buy process. They go through various phases – awareness, identification, evaluation. The key to selling today is to understand where the buyer might be’ at any given time and to develop strategies and tactics that serve up the appropriate content and messaging. Do they need a white paper or an analyst briefing? Do they need a demonstration or an ROI calculator? The marketer that changes their focus from selling to helping customers buy is the marketer that will succeed in today’s competitive climate. Search engine optimization, site navigation, pay per click, link referral, decision/offer maps are all techniques that can and should be leveraged to help you align with your customer. There are many skills today’s marketer needs to master to not only keep their jobs but to grow and enjoy a satisfying career. At the root of it, understand how to leverage available technology and implement the proper financial metrics. Doing this will put you well on the way to marketing success.