October 24

Working together

This month’s topic is all about working together. I have been in companies where when I walked through the door marketing was in a little ivory tower. Totally disconnected from the rest of the business. In one extreme case – the various subsections of marketing were totally disconnected from each other.

Does that deliver results? Does that make a business successful?

No!

Why should marketing work with other departments? Or really why should every department work with every other one? Because that gets results, makes the business stronger, increases profit.

In many businesses sales and marketing and disconnected. That benefits no-one. Marketing aren’t there to just put leads in the top of the funnel, but to ensure that the leads are fully qualified when handed over to improve sales efficiency. To have the right assets ready for each section of the funnel. Sales enablement is an overlooked part of marketing. Marketing really should have a pipeline target to be measured on. Any campaign’s objectives should be agreed with sales too as achievable.

Finance is not the enemy of the marketing department. By having open communication, by demonstrating that you understand and deliver return on investment, trust will be built. When trust is built the marketing budgeting process because easier, and budgets may even increase.

Marketing needs to be working with R&D. Feeding in customer comments and needs. Ensuring that the product that is in development is one that is suitable for the market. I have seen it go wrong too many times. An earthing / grounding cable that couldn’t be sold in Europe as it was only green not green and yellow (which was also acceptable in the Americas). Two SKUs instead of one has implications for stocking and manufacturing runs. It could have been so easy for this mistake to not occur. A software product that the development guys thought was totally unique. An individual had sunk in over ￡40k of his retirement funds to develop it before asking for any market analysis. The software product was embedded into Adobe Suite. His B2B target market was much smaller than he had estimated. Less than six months later the same technology was on every Google Pixel phone so his B2C market evaporated. Again, working with marketing would have saved him the money and the time.

Last year I wrote a whole newsletter about Marketing working with HR. Internal marketing, internal communications are key in every company. Plus keeping the brand and brand values in job adverts is also important.

Customer services have a wealth of customer feedback for marketing to use. They are on the front edge and know what is working, what product amends are needed, what processes need fixing… Use that knowledge in improving across the marketing Ps.

Operations and marketing need to work together. At one company I scrapped 400,000€ of out of date collateral. It wasn’t that much of a loss as the warehouse manager (a) sold them to be recycled and (b) it opened up shelf space for more stock which made order fulfilment quicker and easier. At another company we had a campaign running and to start we thought that we had a real grey importing problem. Then we realised that it was the warehouse workers using O instead of 0 in the serial numbers. A small error, but one that would have given issues getting support and so on in the future.

Logistics by marketing working with sales building accurate sales forecasts the logistics (And operations) can plan and use the most cost-effective shipping methods instead of being behind the curve. This all feeds into the ESG initiatives for the company.

New launch!

Marketing to Thrive is a new community aimed at small and start-up companies who know they should pay marketing attention, but are not sure of why, how or what. The community is built on four pillars:

Let’s chat – a safe space discussion forum

Let’s learn – at least one new training video & workbook uploaded per month.

Let’s be accountable – goals shared are goals achieved, especially with the support of the community.

Let’s catch-up – fortnightly Q&A Teams video sessions hosted by me, where you can bring your marketing queries and get answers. In addition, we will have a variety of guest speakers including topics such as using AI in marketing, how to get the best out of Google Ads, how video can be used effectively by companies of all sizes…

First month is free of charge (until end October 2024 for the community founders) then either ￡50+VAT a month with no commitments or ￡500+VAT for a year.

Further details, including bonuses, can be found here

What's coming up

Thursday 10th October at 2pm I am delivering a LinkedIn Live about Setting Priorities. Well we are getting to that planning time of year for many companies who run January to December years.

My book, Thrive, not just Survive, was number one in the Kindle charts for business information technology last week, and number 11 in the Kindle sales & marketing section. If you want a read the link is above.

#marketing #technology #smallbusiness #startups

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