Ten Reasons Your Marketing May Be Underperforming

I’ve never met a salesperson – or a sales executive – who, when pressed why he or she isn’t hitting their number, won’t list “Our Marketing Sucks” somewhere in the top three causes. 

Sometimes, it’s legitimate criticism; it’s frighteningly easy for the Marketing department to become an Ivory Tower… disconnected from the street-level issues in the marketplace that sales reps have to live with every day. On the flip-side, it’s also easy for sales reps, in the desperation of seeing one prospect after another slip away, to forget all of their training, toss the marketing playbook, and improvise. 

And who can blame them? If the company’s messaging is so disconnected from customer needs, tossing it might be the right thing to do. If you’re a sales rep, you have the luxury of second-guessing your colleagues in Marketing. But if you’re the head of Marketing – or the CEO to whom they report – you need to do something about it. Fast. 

Auditing all of your marketing messaging, processes and interactions with other departments will take some time. If there’s some urgency to make significant progress quickly, you should start by first looking into the following commonly-found problems:

1. Your Marketing and Sales are structured to play “Singles” in a “Doubles” sport
2. You are not leveraging your current customers (though 89% of prospects want to hear from them)
3. Your Marketing and Sales aren’t working together to feed the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU)
4. You haven’t made a company-wide commitment to nurturing middle-of-the-funnel leads (MOFU)
5. You’re flipping leads to Sales before they are properly qualified as they reach the bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU)
6. You’re forgetting The Iron Triangle when the heat is on
7. Your Website visitors aren’t content with your content
8. You’re stuck in your own echo chamber
9. Your messaging says, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
10. Your creative doesn’t have stopping power it should

1. Your Marketing and Sales are structured to play “Singles” in a “Doubles” sport

A lot of marriages in our community tennis league were probably saved by one simple league rule: Married couples may not play together as a doubles team. If you’ve ever played doubles, you already know all about the two worst types of partners: those who are “ball hogs” and those who are “laggards.” Having either one as a partner is a formula for frustration and defeat. And maybe divorce.

World-class Marketing and Sales departments have learned to play doubles together with great success: they each cover their side of the court, anticipate their partner’s next move, and step in – or back off – as needed by their teammate. Such teams are always seeking to improve, bringing new ideas forward, and cross-pollinating those ideas with an eye on winning together.

The best Marketing people see themselves as being in “Pre-Sales,” doing everything they can to help their teammates in Sales to succeed by generating qualified leads vetted by sound strategy and flawless execution. Good marketers are trained to hear, understand, and assimilate tactical, first-hand market intelligence from Sales; they consider it a key component of their primary market research, and an essential complement to their strategic, secondary research from third-parties.

Likewise, the best sales people meet with their marketing teams regularly, share personal observations from the front lines, and really make an effort to understand marketing strategy before dismissing it. They need to bring the heat of the marketplace into the Marketing department, lest it become an Ivory Tower built on faux tribal knowledge and arms-length secondary research.

With the CEO’s avid encouragement (or prodding), the Marketing leader and the Sales leader should take steps to formalize the synergy between their teams, encourage the cross-pollination of ideas, and sponsor boots-on-the-ground planning and implementation activities: nothing that happens in one department ever should be a surprise to the other. 

To ensure this, the head of Sales and the head of Marketing should each appoint a designated “Ambassador” to the other’s organization to man the hotline between the two departments, and participate in on the other’s departmental staff meetings, planning sessions, pub nights, holiday parties, and everything else. They become part of the family.

How do you hard-wire this kind of synergy? By making it part of your culture, organizational structure, and management processes. Though no one likes meetings, three weekly “huddles” – none longer than 90 minutes –will dramatically improve the synergy between Sales, Marketing, and the C-level:

1. C-Level Reporting - Once the Ambassadors are in place, the CEO, the head of sales, the head of marketing, and their Ambassadors should meet weekly for 90 minutes to discuss sales, major opportunities, pipeline, lead generation results and upcoming marketing campaigns. The meeting should include rolling updates on key metrics, and progress made/shortfalls since the previous meeting’s commitments. Culturally, there’s a lot of value for the CEO and the Ambassadors getting the opportunity to work together, since they typically may not; the visibility and exchange of ideas is valuable to both. (I like to schedule these meeting for 10:30AM so when they go into overtime, and they will, a working lunch can follow.) 
2. VP-Level Sync-Up: The day before the CEO briefing, the head of sales, the head of marketing, and the Ambassadors should meet for 30-60 minutes to discuss progress and developments in their respective departments and conjoined activities. Materials for the next-day’s agenda with the CEO should be reviewed and updated, along with an executive summary of key developments and recommendations that may require a decision/action by the CEO. Materials should then be sent to the CEO by mid-afternoon, to give him or her the opportunity to review real-time status of activities prior to the next day’s meeting.
3. Team-Level Buy-In: After the CEO briefing, the Sales and Marketing teams should hold their own departmental All-Hands meeting, to give a state-of the-union address to their respective teams, as well as share the CEO’s thoughts about the department and its priorities. This ensures that two important departments – Marketing and Sales – are in sync with one another, and with the CEO’s expectations. Ambassadors should have a permanent spot on the agenda in each meeting to provide an update on activities within their own department, and listen intently to ideas and concerns raised. The goal, of course, is to ensure that each department is continually informed about and understands the priorities of the other.

These suggestions may not apply to all organizational structures. If you are responsible for both marketing and sales (e.g. Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing & Sales Officer, etc.) you understandably need to make near-term revenue your top priority. But it’s important that you find members on your staff who can focus on each of these areas for you in tandem: it’s vital for the long-term that Marketing not become a second-class citizen while you are occupied with sales activities.

2. You are not leveraging your current customers (though 89% of prospects want to hear from them)

The customer isn’t always right. But he or she is always holding the checkbook, so keeping them happy needs to be the marketing department’s highest priority. If you’ve ever been in a meaningful relationship, you’ve already learned that a key part of keeping people happy is listening to them… absorbing what they are saying… and letting them see that their words had effect, by virtue of your behavior. Not listening, and thus not demonstrating seriousness about the relationship, means it goes nowhere.

Marketing’s job is to be constantly engaged with your customers and prospects – directly, through the sales force, and through its industry relationships – and then ask the right questions to confirm that they got it right, via surveys, focus groups, and “mystery shopper” customer interviews. 

Based upon the insights gleaned from all that listening, Marketing’s job is to understand the SWOT implications posed by industry trends and requirements, develop a corresponding strategy, and then share its recommendations with colleagues in planning and development roles throughout the company.

Once you’ve forged those customer relationships – as evidenced generically by your NPS score, and specifically by the number of references you are able to document – they become your secret weapon. In a survey ranking the most effective content marketing tools, customer testimonials were chosen 89% of the time; case studies were 88%. In another, 90% of survey respondents said they relied on reviews before making a purchase; 85% said they read up to 10 reviews. 

So if you want more customers, get out there and start talking with, and listening to, the ones you already have. By making satisfied customers front-and-center of all of your market-facing activities – in the form case studies, ROI whitepapers, social media posts, postings on review sites, etc. – you’ll attract more qualified leads than ever before.

3. Your Marketing and Sales aren’t working together to feed the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU)

Though it is primarily Marketing’s responsibility to keep the sales funnel brimming with new names –via digital marketing campaigns, content, SEO, social media, and others – Sales is an essential resource for helping to guide lead generation efforts. Both teams should take fact-finding opportunities like Win-Loss Reports very seriously, and mine them for tactical selling and strategic SWOT purposes. 

If you think of business as a battlefield, Sales is fighting a ground war, and Marketing is providing support from the air. In their weekly or biweekly planning sessions together, Sales should be sharing important tactical observations with Marketing, such as:

• Competitor A just launched a new financing offer that is very effective against us
• Competitor B just hired a new sales manager in the northeast, and she’s hurting us up here
• Competitor C just launched new product that costs 30% less than ours
• A lot of prospects are suddenly asking about [fill in the blank]
• Leads in the Gulf State region are down 60%
• Though we usually serve Physical Therapists, we starting calling on Occupational Therapists and they’ve been super-receptive; there’s a lot more synergy than we realized

These sorts of practical field reports are highly valuable to the Marketing team; it gives them information about what’s happening on the ground, and provides them with the insights needed to create programs that infuse targeted, short-term urgency into its larger long-term strategy… which ultimately repays Sales by providing a better coordinated air and ground war.

4. You haven’t made a company-wide commitment to nurturing middle-of-the-funnel leads (MOFU)

Congratulations: your conversion rates are twice the industry average, and your Marketing Automation system is bursting with potential, but as yet unqualified, contacts. But since only 5-10% of those contacts will eventually turn into customers, the challenge for Marketing is to quickly identify which are the bona fide qualified prospects. Marketing does this using lead cultivation processes known as nurturing and lead-scoring: 

1. Nurturing is the process in which information (“content”) is spoon-fed to prospects methodically and consistently over a sustained period of time (“touches”), until you gradually earn their trust and lead them further into the AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) funnel.
2. Lead-scoring gives those prospects a number of points for every interaction with you: downloading a whitepaper might give them 10 points, attending a webinar might add another 20 points, and so on. When a prospect amasses a predetermined number of points, they are, from an AIDA perspective, most likely ripe for a call from your sales reps.

Here in the SEO era, lead generation, nurturing, and scoring comes as a result high-quality original content published by your company. This content is what fires up the search engines and sends social media into a spin… but Marketing can’t generate it on its own: it needs industry, technology, and other subject-matter expertise from throughout your organization. 

Your on-staff SMEs – people who have the same credentials as those to whom you are marketing (PhDs, homemakers, EE’s, IT executives, Millennials, etc.) – are your most valuable sources of rich content: they speak the same language as your prospects, understand the problems they are facing, and in many cases even belong to the same professional associations and societies. 

Your SMEs are the perfect messengers to deliver your company’s non-commercial content, and should be incentivized to work with the Marketing organization to get the word out to their professional peers via writing, blogging, and posting to social media.

5. You’re flipping leads to Sales before they are properly qualified as they reach the bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU)

BOFU is short for bottom-of-the-funnel. Generically speaking, it is the stage at which leads typically pass from Marketing to Sales. But exactly when and where that hand-off occurs is a decision that shouldn’t be made lightly; it’s vitally important… and it will vary for each organization, depending on your team, your internal processes, and perhaps even your industry. 

Historically, sales teams referred to leads a being hot, warm, or cold… a description of their willingness to buy TODAY. As marketing became more of a science, the lead-to-sales process became more evolutionary, consisting of four classically-accepted stages – awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA) – which described a prospect’s progress towards a purchase decision OVER TIME. 

But in the new era of digital marketing and Marketing Automation – and the fact that hundreds or thousands of new names appear electronically every day – these old terms are too dated, broad and imprecise. To create a common language from the old to the new, we’ll translate them as follows:

1. Awareness Stage = Cold Lead = Marketing-Accepted Lead (MAL): Marketing determine that a lead possesses the required attributes to warrant further qualification; only 15-25% of all inquiries are accepted as MALs.
2. Interest Stage = Cold Lead = Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL): Marketing qualifies the lead to an extent that it appears to be worthy of sales attention; a survey of marketers estimates that about 40-50% of MALs become MQLs.
3. Desire Stage = Warm Lead = Sales-Accepted Lead (SAL): Sales concurs with Marketing’s assessment of alead’s quality, and agrees to follow up; in general, 80-90% of MQLs become SALs
4. Action Stage = Hot Lead = Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL): Sales attempts to convert, resulting in win or loss; win rates vary, but market leaders are in the 25-35% range. But unlike in the old days, leads that were losses are not discarded: having been deemed a qualified prospect, they remain on nurturing list (unless they opt out) in the event they revisit their decision in the future, or the decision-maker moves into another role where he/she might purchase again.

Your goal should be that no sales reps are given leads before they reach the SAL stage (and in some companies, the SQL stages.) This multi-stage MAL/MQ/SALs/SQL approach seems like a slow, over-engineered process. But it prevents the Sales team from being deluged with tons of electronically-generated pseudo-leads that received zero scrutiny or nurturing along the way. Instead of drowning Sales reps under a waterfall of prospects that they have to swim through on their own, these stages act like dams, reservoirs, and levees to hold back the flood waters and protect reps’ most valuable asset: their time. Every moment reps spend chasing bad prospects is time that isn’t spent closing good ones… and it can never be recovered.

6. You’re forgetting “The Iron Triangle” when the heat is on

Years ago, I was at a printer doing the final press check on an elaborate (read: expensive) brochure. In their conference room was a sign that said, “Quality. Speed. Price. Pick Any Two.” While I waited, the implications of that sign, its various permutations, and its implications for all aspects of business really sunk in: there is no substitute for doing quality, methodical work, and demonstrating the patience to give people the time and budget necessary to succeed.

A similar concept, known as the “The Iron Triangle,” is taught in business schools. And it’s very relevant to lead generation and sales. Here’s why: because of the emphasis on getting lots of leads to the Sales department quickly, speed and volume becoming the driving priorities; in that self-imposed haste, lead quality – and thus sales results – frequently suffers, as unmanageable numbers of leads are passed to Sales before they are sufficiently qualified (or nurtured). And because Sales is wasting time pitching prospects who aren’t sufficiently qualified, close rates (or conversion rates) decline.

Troubled times often making it tempting to resort to desperate measures – like taking the caps off your daily Google spend – that won’t solve the problem and could even worsen the situation, by creating a dreadful downward spiral: bad lead quality means fewer sales… fewer sales means increased pressure to sell… pressure on Sales tempts Marketing to pass through more leads faster without confirming their quality… as revenue drops, marketing programs are trimmed… meaning fewer leads overall.

When slow times happen, the answer isn’t to flood your sales reps with more unqualified leads; a better approach is to slow down, work those MOFU leads extra hard, and try to squeeze out the ones that show signs of ripening faster than the others. Patience is hard when your sense of urgency is telling you the opposite; but the marketer who keeps a cool head when the rest of the organization is panicking, and helps unearth those hidden SALs, will be the one who saves the day.

7. Your Website visitors aren’t with content your content

In a recent survey, nearly 80% of CMOs said they believed that the creation and delivery of quality custom content is the future of marketing. And Google’s growth certainly seems to suggest that’s true. But how can you know for sure if the marketplace is even interested in your content? Here are the leading metrics to watch:

• New and return Website visitors: If you are consistently producing quality content, and that content is attracting new visitors – whether by organic search or paid PPC – you will see a continual uptick in your site traffic. Similarly, if past visitors continue to return, it means that they are finding your site content to be compelling.
• Bounce rate: A “bounce” is when someone comes to your site and does not take any action, e.g. they don’t click to see more content, fill out a lead form, etc. Bounce rates vary by industry (e.g. , B2B tends to be high, where eTail and services tend to be low) and by type of page (landing pages tend to be high, but news is usually low/medium). But for most businesses, it is generally agreed that less than 40% is very good, 40-55% is average, 55-70% is below average, and anything higher than 70% indicates a serious problem.
• Top pages: These are pages where visitors to your Website most frequently land. Since you know where they are coming from, and what content attracted them, knowing your top pages tells you what types of topics – whitepapers, case studies, etc. – draws prospects to your site.
• Conversion rate: Your conversion rate – the percentage of people who place an order, request more information, set up a demo, etc. – is a very strong indicator of what kind of content moves prospects to take action. Though it varies by industry and experts promote different findings, an average landing page conversion is between 2-3%; those converting 5% or higher are in the top 25% of all sites; those converting 10% or higher are in the top 10% of all sites (Monetate, Statistica, and Wordstream have published good reports on the subject.)
• PPC/CTR – “Pay-per-click”)/Click-through rate”: If your paid content is doing its job, your company’s PPC ads and SEO results will be significant sources of TOFU new names, that hopefully convert into bona fide leads. You should be watching results closely, and scrubbing your ad words list weekly.

8. You’re stuck in your own echo chamber

Saying you’re stuck in your own echo chamber is a much nicer metaphor than the ones you usually hear: believing your own bullshit… smoking your own dope… drinking the Kool-Aid, etc. 

But it could be that they all apply. I am constantly amazed when I meet with executives and hear them describe all of the reasons that prospects would be nuts to choose a competitor over their company; and yet, when we dig into the market share figures, growth rates, and win-loss reports together… they’re getting slaughtered. 

While they are just plodding along, their arch-rival (it’s usually only one) holds more market share, is growing faster, and wins in three-quarters of the sales engagements in which they compete head-to-head. And yet, they keep whistling past the graveyard, ignoring the fact that they are on a path to nowhere. Or worse, on the way to getting acquired by the competitor who would prefer you’d go away anyway; acquisitions have a way of becoming cruel, self-fulfilling prophesies that way.

It is marketing’s job to get companies out of their echo chamber, and find out what is really happening in Customerland. The news won’t always be pleasant or popular, but it is an essential first step in facing reality and fixing problems. You won’t be an effective marketing organization if you are not listening to the market, and understanding its implications for your SWOT. And if you’re not an effective marketing organization, ask yourself, how good will sales be?

9. Your messaging says, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

If you’ve ever been to a party (or in stuck a meeting) where you were introduced to a boor who could not stop talking about themselves, recall the impression that they made on you: you probably couldn’t wait to get the hell away from them.

Now, take a look at your customer-facing marketing materials. Is your messaging all about what they’re buying… or what you’re selling? Are you addressing the wants and needs of prospective clients… or does it sound like a lot of self-important corporate chest-beating? 

Prospects like to see themselves – or better, who they aspire to be – in marketing materials. They want the peace of mind that comes from knowing that they are considering a solution from someone who’s well-versed in the problems they are solving, and have successfully solved them for others.

That’s why voice-of-the-customer (VOC) is such a powerful messaging strategy: instead of you boorishly touting your own virtues, your satisfied clients – people exactly like your prospects – are praising them for you. And when you conduct your quarterly NPS survey, you should be scouring the results for customer who can make your marketing messaging shine in the form of case studies and references.

10. Your creative doesn’t have the stopping power it should

There are a lot of debates about whether marketing is an “Art” or a “Science.” But there’s no debating what A/B testing consistently proves: some messaging simply outperforms others. Proponents of marketing-as-an-art will say that’s because the creative was more clever and appealing; proponents of marketing-as-a-science will disagree, saying that it checked the right boxes in term of psychographics, etc.

Both are partially right. In a perfect world, beyond just creating custom content for each major user persona, you would be able serve up content for prospects who are risk-adverse, technophobic, cost-conscious, and every other psychographic. And over time, progressive profiling will enable you to build a detailed dossier on each Website visitor. (And as new AI-based algorithms are deployed – enabling machine learning of our online behavior, social behavior, and personality – we’re in for a spectacular, albeit spooky, online experience.)

But until you’re at that stage, you need to develop messaging that really resonates with prospects; something that has the type of irresistible appeal that causes prospects to be drawn to you like moths to a porchlight. Few creative types are able to devise those types of gems in their heads. Those who are, got there by spending a lot of time with customers: understanding their business, identifying with the daily problems they face, and learning why they selected you over the competition. Good creative development is more than just clever quips: it’s the backbreaking process of gathering tons of customer feedback, and distilling it into a compelling, easy-to-understand message.

One of the biggest flaws is messaging that sounds like everybody else in your industry: same jargon… same buzzwords… same claims. From a distinctiveness and relevance standpoint, this is a death sentence. When you parrot when everyone else in the industry, you’re blending in, instead of standing out. Alternatively, help prospects understand what makes you unique, and how that benefits them; telling them up-front what’s in it for them positions you as a partner who’s looking out for them.

Summary

Long before your marketing starts to underperform, the early indicators will be there for those who are looking for them. Setting your marketing team up for success organizationally, supporting them with reasonable resources from across the company, and insisting that they measure and report on their results on a daily basis ensures that potential issues are identified, isolated, and resolved before they reach serious proportions.

If you are the marketing executive for your company, reach out to your counterpart in sales; really try to understand the challenges he or she hears from their reps in the field, and listen to their ideas for addressing those challenges. Share your research findings and strategy ideas with them, to see how they think they will play with prospects. Bottom line: the closer you stay to the front lines of selling, the more effective you will be as a marketer.

About the author:

Jim Neumann founded Webmark Partners from IBM, where he was vice president of marketing and communications for the IBM Technology Group. Working either as a consultant or on-staff executive, he has many years of experience leading companies to +400% revenue growth, outpacing their competitors by as much as 12x, in STEM, Healthcare, MedTech, Analytics, CyberSec, IoT, Power and Energy, and others