Ten Traits of Great Marketing Teams

One of the perks of being ambivocational – working either as an embedded marketing consultant, or jumping in with both feet as an on-staff CMO – is that you get to see a lot of different marketing teams in action. As with any team sport, a few are dazzling to watch, while most are just a couple of tweaks short of being really good.  But some are just painful to be around: at the end of the day you’re utterly drained by their negativity and frustrated by their blind obedience to a failed status quo. It’s like Nineteen Eighty-Four in the workplace, complete with company-specific Doublethink, Newspeak, and Crimestopping.

Good teams have solid processes and internal systems; these are important, but they aren’t enough anymore. The biggest difference between a dynastic and a dysfunctional marketing team is the day-to-day work habits of team members: great marketers have strong instincts and intellectual curiosity (that you can’t teach) coupled with a good work habits and a strong work ethic (that you can).

So whether team members have it as part of their own DNA, or it’s attained through the osmosis of being part of a winning culture, Great Marketing Teams have work habits that set them apart:

1.      They start from the customer, and work backwards to CHQ

2.      They trust their creative instincts, but bet on their data*

3.      They have a winning culture, and maintain perfectly-balanced team chemistry

4.      They never stop looking for ways to improve

5.      They understand their market and are passionate about competing

6.      They are mind-melded with their C-level**

7.      They respect process, but adjust to seize unplanned opportunities

8.      They make do with what they have to work with

9.      They raise their game when the heat is on

10.   They are maniacal about quality, execution, deadlines, and budgets***

* Note: A LinkedIn article on marketing data analytics planning and management can be read at https://goo.gl/ypHtWY

** Note: A LinkedIn article on how to get your C-level engaged with Marketing can be read at https://goo.gl/rGmuxs

1. Great Marketing Teams start from the customer, and work backwards to CHQ

Great marketing teams listen way more than they talk. They eavesdrop on the market intently, keeping an ear for opportunity. While average teams are too busy talking, blogging, and posting to try to cajole the market to listen to them, Great Marketing Teams do the opposite: they invest a lot of time with their best customers, trying to understand their business, day-to-day challenges, and internal operations… so while they say fewer things, they hit the target consistently.

Great Marketing Teams are always looking for an opportunity to serve customers better; and then, more importantly, they leverage those customers to get even more customers. Armed with their insights, they return to their offices and work backwards on new market-driven solutions, asking themselves:

• What are the real problems customers are trying to solve, and how can we help them?
• What features, functions, and services can we easily add that would solve those problems?
• What is the most convenient way for them to purchase and pay for it?
• Is there some type of guarantee or warranty that would clinch the deal?
• Once they buy, how do we make it easier to deploy, learn, and use?
• If training or post-sale support is necessary, how can we provide it?
• How we extend the life of the customer relationship to its fullest?
• Can we extend from our current markets into others?
• Are there companies out there who could be allies?

Marginal marketing teams are so busy broadcasting what they’re selling, they often ignore what competitors are offering and what customers are actually buying… or would buy, if anyone would stop and listen.

In the classic Harvard Business Review article “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt notes that U.S. railroads declined because their leadership failed to comprehend the threat posed by the automobile, cars, trucks, and ultimately the airplane; they were “railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.” In other words, they were so used to railroading the public, that they failed to see all of the new, emerging options becoming available to passengers for getting themselves and them cargo around.

Bad marketers still do the same thing today: they look at their SWOT charts, and lull themselves to sleep promoting their Ss, forgetting all about Os and Ts in the marketplace. That is, until they get woken up by a 2x4 in the hands of a competitor of whom they’ve never heard previously, or disregarded.

How to get better: In a class on market research, a professor of mine at Wharton said something sagacious and memorable: “In business, you’re rarely [screwed] by the things you didn’t know. But you are repeatedly and painfully [screwed] by the things you are absolutely certain of… and you’re wrong.” Pretty colorful advice; and my years of business experience since then proved him to be absolutely right.

If you want to be a marketer who’s right most of the time, recognize that your SWOT chart changes daily. Never stop flipping over rocks; always be actively seek out new information and new ways of doing things. When you hit something, dig faster: if your research warns that your product roadmap is a dead-end… if your pricing studies show that a price war looms ahead in your industry… if you hear at an industry event that a competitor is launching a new product that promises to double your performance at half your price… raise the red flag with your product group ASAP. 

Always be open-minded to what you discover, and don’t be afraid of serendipitous findings. Remember: Viagra was developed to be a high blood pressure medication; it missed the mark... but a common “side effect” reported by trial study participants created a new, $3.4 billion market.

2. Great Marketing Teams trust their creative instincts, but bet on their data

In the Great “Art vs. Science” marketing debate, there are those who feel that the best marketing is achieved via gut instinct; others firmly believe that it results from arduous number-crunching of buyer personas, demographics, and psychographics. In reality, marketing is both art and science: you need both, working in tandem – like the left and right oars of a rowboat – to get anywhere. Otherwise, you’re just spinning in circles. 

Think about that for a moment. Great creative will draw lots of inquiries… but if you’re not capturing and analyzing them, what’s the point? On the flipside, it’s great to have a highly-engineered MAL/MQL/SAL/SQL-driven lead funnel in place… but only if your creative is generating lots of interest, traffic, and inquiries. You’ll have built the Hoover Dam, with no water gushing through the turbines.

There’s no doubt that creative marketing minds can design smartly effective campaigns, detailed lead nurturing programs, and clever customer-facing deliverables.  But when the show’s over, the only thing that matters are the KPIs: leads generated… open rates… conversions… pipeline… revenue. You’re as good as you can prove you are. That’s why W. Edwards Deming – America’s preeminent engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant in his day – once said, “In God we trust; all others bring data.”

How to get better: Start by believing that for modern-day marketers, data about your KPIs is the marketing department’s only tradable currency with other departments. It’s the number one thing that gives you credibility and influence among the C-level.

If you haven’t already, create dashboards of your daily, must-have data. Once you are getting it, check it daily for changes: new leads… how many converted since yesterday… which campaigns are performing best… which contacts are responding nurturing. Most Marketing Automation systems (like Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Hubspot, etc.) make tracking all of this incredibly easy, so long as you have clear KPIs and good data. 

Every marketing employee needs to know – every day – how many leads they’ve generated, their conversion rate, contribution to pipeline, and revenue won. They also need to routinely A/B test their work, to understand which appeals perform best with their prospects. And then they need to keep hammering away with whatever the data dictates.

At one company, we reported these numbers to the CEO every morning at 8:30AM; if there was no progress to show, you could count on a 1:1 meeting with him at 9:00AM. Given that kind of scrutiny, pretty soon, everyone on the marketing team makes “mastering the data” a top priority.

3. Great Marketing Teams have a winning culture, and maintain perfectly-balanced team chemistry

Business guru Peter Drucker is credited as saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And he’s right. A team that trains, prepares, and fully expects to win is reinforcing a winning culture that becomes self-perpetuating. It’s more than swagger; it’s backed up by performance. 

In sports, a great current example of this is the New England Patriots: love them or hate them, they’ve played in more Super Bowls than any other NFL team. As one player – who’d played for three other teams previously – said, “"I love everything about being here with the Patriots. Everyone here is about one thing: winning. That's the culture here." 

Need proof that it’s more culture than talent? In winning Super Bowl VI in 2017, the Patriots’ 11-man offensive huddle had five undrafted free agents, draft pick 232 from 2009 (Julian Edelman), and draft pick 199 from way back in 2000: Tom Brady, who had a half-dozen QBs picked before him… an astonishing slight that, nearly 20 years and five Super Bowl rings later, stills fuels his competitive fire. Clearly, they are doing great things with players no one else wanted.

Though Patriots coach Bill Belichick is regarded as a genius in football strategy, he is first and foremost a champion of building a winning team culture. His mantra, “Do Your Job,” is described by SBNation as “you have an assignment and you execute that assignment. Seems easy enough. To make this idea work, the coaching staff must have the credibility for the players to buy in. But more importantly, the coaches must hold the players accountable for not living up to the standards.”

Sounds a lot like business, doesn’t it? Marketing departments don’t have QBs and linebackers. But they have content developers… campaign strategists… graphic artists… and other specialized roles where people come and go over time. Regardless of their own functional role, teammates on Great Marketing Teams understand the importance of their role in the team’s overall success. Holding teammates accountable isn’t just the job of coaches; it’s everyone’s job on the team: every teammate needs to set high standards for themselves, and for one another, to make the weakest link stronger. (If you are the weak link on an otherwise Great Marketing Team, you’d better be thick-skinned about all of the helpful coaching coming your way from your teammates.)

How to get better: if you are a coach, set your players up for success. Give clear, measurable, attainable goals, and celebrate when they are achieved. If you are a teammate, take the initiative to work with colleagues to build better departmental processes. Figure out ways to leverage and repurpose one another’s work. Celebrate good play by a teammate, and give them a shout-out across the organization. When you do a great job of something, thank your teammates; tell them – and everyone else who’s listening – that you couldn’t have done it without them. Because that’s truer than you probably realize.

When there are openings on the team, consider:

• Finding your own candidates, within your and your teammates’ own personal networks, who come highly recommended. If you don’t know of someone, hire a recruiter, or use Linkedin to poach someone whose work you’ve admired
• Having as many members of the team interview candidates as possible… not just to assess their skills, but to see how they mix with the existing team chemistry
• At minimum, walking them around the department to meet everyone, and see how they mingle. Consider a roving interview, where – rather than sticking a candidate in a conference room in HR – you show them the work environment, and listen to their comments about the surroundings (“that reminds me of this cool campaign we did at IBM, where we…”) Great ice breaker, and a chance to learn their work personality.
• When you bring in a new teammate, resist the urge to compare them to the person they are replacing. People are different, with a diversity of skills. You don’t want to marginalize them by trying to turn them into the person who just left.
• While I’m not suggesting an NFL-like draft to bring in new talent or annual tryouts that force employees to re-earn their jobs, understand that there are merits to letting people go if they don’t like the culture, can’t keep up with the pace, or refuse to accept coaching. It’s sad when things don’t work out, but a change of scenery is frequently best for unhappy employees… and the team can always benefit from a new, motivated teammate bringing in fresh ideas.

Build a culture and support system that results in a stronger team and a better end-product, one that improves player performance without creating offense along the way. Foster an environment in which team members keep watching one another’s’ backs: proofreading one another’s copy, reporting dead links, suggesting problems in a layout, offering work that can be repurposed in other ways, etc. They respect one another’s talents and their time; they meet their deadlines, so they don’t ruin a colleague’s weekend. Build that reputation, and you’ll be surprised how many people throughout the organization suddenly want to work in Marketing.

4. Great Marketing Teams never stop looking for ways to improve

When the Wall Street Journal published a timeline of mobile phone milestones, what jumps out at you first is how quickly the hot devices of their day suddenly turned ice cold – typically in just 24-36 months – when a new design comes along. Back in the day, no one could imagine a better mobile phone than the Motorola StarTAC… until flip-phones were crushed by the Blackberry… which was, in turn, put out to pasture (and effectively out of business) by the Apple iPhone. Will the day come when the iPhone is a relic? Yes. And there are people at Apple making sure that if a product comes along that makes the iPhone obsolete… that product will also come from Apple (“product cannibalization,” a good thing.)

Great marketers realize that change never stops; and as marketers, we need to be constantly eyeing the landscape for whatever change is coming our way, and understand how quickly our little SWOT charts can be turned upside-down. There are two types of change in the business world: change you can’t control and change you can. If you are really watching the marketplace, you’ll rarely be caught off-guard by a competitor’s moves, but you are in complete control of the changes you initiate within your own company. The element of surprise is a powerful weapon in business; there’s nothing more fun than watching your competitors scramble because you came up with a new idea they never saw coming.

Great Marketing Teams never rest on their laurels. Like winning sports teams, they revel in their wins for a day or two… then start preparing for the next game: studying opponents, developing a game plan, and constantly looking for weaknesses… their opponents’ and their own.

How to get better: Marketers are high-energy people. Hire people who love to keep score, are willing to work hard to improve, and a bring Fantasy Football League-grade passion to the numbers that drive your department. Ask about their hobbies; if their hobbies are competitive, that’s a good omen. Shoot candidates an email after-hours, just to see who’s plugged in. A friend of mine leaves a paper wad on the floor of his office when interviewing candidates, just to see who’s going to show the initiative to pick it up and throw it out; he says it shows whether or not they take pride in the team.

Several years ago, Forbes ran an article, “Why Wrestlers Make the Best Employees.” It talked about the importance of wrestlers’ individual commitment, bouncing back from adversity, and relentlessly looking for even the smallest competitive advantage to exploit during a match. The article raised a point that is often overlooked: unlike every other individual sport – swimming, tennis, track, etc. – wrestling is a 24x7 regimen: in other sports, when practice is over, it’s over. But in wrestling, because of the need to make weight, practice follows you… to the kitchen, the school cafeteria, and to the bathroom scale. It’s a whole different level of dedication and sacrifice.

One of my all-time best hires was someone I stole from another department. His VP thought he seemed restless and dissatisfied; we in Marketing saw someone who was too high energy and too ambitious for the role he was in. We moved him to Marketing and a year later, because of his own drive and initiative, he was the third highest-ranked employee in the company. Find people who possess that type of passion for winning, get them on your team, channel their energies, and you’ll be on your way to higher levels of departmental performance. 

5. Great Marketing Teams understand their market and are passionate about competing

“Greed,” as Gordon Gekko famously said, “is good.” The only thing better for marketers is greed fueled by competition: Coke vs. Pepsi, Marvel vs. DC, Ford vs. Chevy, UPS vs. Fedex, Burger King vs. McDonalds, Crest vs. Colgate… all representing tens of billions of dollars in marketing spending. 

Corporate greed is good for the consumer: we get tastier burgers, cheaper flights, lower cellphone bills, and ever-improving phones and laptops. Corporate rivalries are good for the economy, too: they create marketing jobs, competition for employees, and advertising plans that funds all of the news, entertainment, and sports we enjoy on our big screen TVs (the price of which decreased 94% over the years, thanks to competition.)

Great marketers live to be a part of such competition; once in it, they are constantly seeking advantage. Like professional athletes eyeing the scoreboard or tracking their opponents’ stats after every game, Great Marketing Teams are constantly monitoring competitors’ performance and looking for vulnerabilities.

It’s marketing’s job to stay abreast of the market, and propose ways to stay ahead of it; do a good job of that, and your team will enjoy a heightened level of respect from throughout the company and the entire industry in which you compete.

How to get better: A famous marketer once said, “If you don't have a competitor, create one.” Competition makes us better: we need to constantly impose change on ourselves, make ourselves better, and keep morphing into a more formidable adversary in the marketplace.

Inspire your team members to absorb competitive intelligence until they are a walking Battle Card, and can rattle off the top advantages you hold over each major competitor. Devote time to thinking and talking about developments in the marketplace, their potential impact on your SWOT, and what your counter-moves are. 

If you do not have a competitive strategist on your marketing team, designate someone to take it on as part of their responsibilities. It’s not a ton of time, and the organizational benefits are significant:

• Set up daily news alerts on all of your competitors, product categories, and industry news; send out a daily flash report, with follow-on commentary from your own execs in their areas of expertise (e.g., your CFO analyzing a competitor’s financial results, your CTO analyzing their product launch, etc.)
• Occasionally, maybe quarterly, bring in an outside expert to give a state-of-the-industry address on new trends, competitive developments, etc. Or hire a “mystery shopper” to do custom, competitive interviews (e.g. calling your wins and losses, prospects, etc.) and have them report on their findings. You will learn what people are really saying behind your back, and glean some genuinely valuable findings.
• Continually check the Linkedin profiles of key execs and your marketing cohorts at your competitors, to keep track of what they are posting, where they are traveling, with whom they are connecting. Creepy? No… competitive.

Information and intelligence is often the difference between winning and losing.  As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be put at risk even in a hundred battles. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.”

6. Great Marketing Teams are mind-melded with their C-level

No offense to sales or financial communications, but you could make a good argument that the Marketing department creates more global impressions than any other, by virtue of a company’s website, social media efforts, and global marketing campaigns. So it is vital that there be uninterrupted mind-meld between the CEO and his or her marketing team, to ensure that the CEO’s vision is part of the organization’s marketing DNA. 

You get that mind-meld by spending time with your CEO, learning what his or her vision is, and articulating it in a manner that is both effective in the marketplace, and better than they would on their own. When your CEO starts hearing – at the grocery store, at their church, at their kids’ soccer games – that their company is doing some cool things, you’ll have a big fan in the corner office.

I am troubled when I hear supposedly smart marketing people claiming that THEY are the source of truth for the company, and the CEO should be following THEIR lead: that’s Ivory Tower inbreeding at its worst. Your CEO is the source of strategy and key messages. Marketing should be feeding them real-time market intelligence and recommendations, but the marketing department’s role is to execute his or her vision, and work with them to create market-friendly adaptions of their messages. Overstepping your boundaries just knocks you out of the Circle of Trust.

How to get better: First, pull together an awesome presentation of your department’s work, including:

• Website stats, leads generated, conversion rate, and contribution to pipeline
• Bookings and revenue that resulted from marketing activities
• Upcoming campaigns and their projected ROI
• LTV/CAC
• PPC/CTR/CPC
• PR & Social Media Metrics

Then, send your presentation to your CEO with a note saying that you’ll send updates weekly, and propose a regular meeting together, to better infuse his or her thinking into marketing’s activities… especially content, social media, etc. Explain that CEOs are more “out front” than ever before, and that collaboration is a win for the company, both internally and externally. (If he or she watches their Glassdoor CEO approval rating, convince them this is a good way to raise it.)

Showing the impact marketing can have on revenue will get you at least a monthly meeting, and hopefully more frequently. Over time, that meeting should evolve into a regular discussion with you and other members of your content team, where your CEO can be “unplugged” for an hour… just offering his or her thoughts on developments within the company, or in the industry at-large. Use this time as though you were a reporter who scored a major interview: take notes, ask questions, and politely push back; make it as gregarious and free-wheeling as possible. When it’s over, you will not only have an amazing understanding of what’s going on in the bosses’ head, you will have enough content for a month’s worth executive whitepapers, employee communications, social media posts, etc.

As you build a comfort level together and start to see measurable results, try to set up a relaxed video session once a quarter – maybe 90 minutes – where you can spend half the time covering scripted remarks, and the rest doing conversational Q&A. These video clips tend to result in more “real” and believable footage for employees, stockholders, customers, and prospects.

7. Great Marketing Teams respect process, but adjust to seize unplanned opportunities

Great Marketing Teams have a non-stop sense of urgency, but they temper it by thinking through problems, and getting fixes right before taking action. Marketing is largely a serial process, especially in the production phases of a campaign; teammates on great teams adhere to process, and look for ways to help colleagues to meet their deadlines. They are disciplined in their thinking and methodical in their actions; like card counters in a casino, they never let emotion distract them from doing what logic and planning dictates.

BUT you have to be prepared to jump on changing market developments, too. I once worked with a company that marketed software and services to physical therapists; because we were paid a percentage of our clients’ revenue, they more they made, the more we made: win-win. So part of our marketing efforts involved convincing referring physicians of the benefits of PT, as opposed to sending them to surgery or prescribing pain killers. In our view, PT was a more natural and effective alternative to surgery, and avoided some of the risks (anesthesia, infection, etc.) associated with it; likewise, pain killers, or opioids, were known to be addictive. And PT beat both in terms of cost-effectiveness.

Our marketing plan changed dramatically one morning in March, when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published one of the first authoritative reports raising the alarm on opioid abuse: it even recommended PT as an effective and cost-effective approach. That CDC report was the first wave in what became a tsunami of media coverage on what is now called “The Opioid Epidemic,” and it was a rare opportunity for seizing on an industry pivot at the perfect moment.

Without interrupting our “regularly-scheduled programming,” we developed a wide range of new campaign elements – leaning heavily on the newsy nature of social media – on opioid abuse; it enabled us to reach top-of-funnel prospects who’d never heard of us before, and was instrumental in the 251% growth we saw in new prospects that year.

How to get better: Having methodical processes will allow your department to produce an enormous amount of quality work, without a lot of fumbles. Tribal knowledge is great; but it can’t be sustained over time, as teammates depart and new ones come aboard. Your processes need to be documented and enhanced as better ones come into play. Flexibility is key: don’t change processes willy-nilly… but don’t be so fixated on “the way we’ve always done things about here,” that you miss out when a new and better way comes along.

That said, being quick on your feet to manage unexpected developments – positive and negative – is a very valuable attribute. As in chess, the ability to assess the implications of an opponent’s surprise move, and respond with a brilliant counter-move, is a rare skill.

Become a student of how companies in other industries reacted to changes in their competitive environment; look for articles in business journals, share them, and discuss them as a team. Talk about how the lessons might apply to your own industry, and brainstorm some ideas for how you would respond if you were in the same position.

8. Great Marketing Teams make do with what they have to work with

You will never have an unlimited budget, all of the headcount you ask for, or A-players in every role of your team. So you improvise. You make do. You take on tasks that are out of your comfort zone. Just as sports teams have to adjust to injuries and free agency, you find a way to win using “Plan B.”

Unless you are the behemoth in your industry, chances are at least one competitor has a bigger staff, deeper budgets, and more resources than you do. Or maybe they have a rock star CEO who is a magnet for the press and social media coverage.

You can’t control such things. And you can’t waste energy trying. But you can outsmart and outflank them. Develop and employ guerrilla marketing techniques to get on prospects’ radar, and under your competitor’s skins. Be unconventional and unpredictable. And be everywhere. Once at an industry conference, we sponsored the complementary Wi-Fi throughout the conference center; we made the password our company name, so every attendee, even our competitors, had to type our name into their phones and laptops every day. 

Great Marketing Teams aren’t above doing whatever is necessary to achieve goals. I’ve seen people making $200,000 a year stuffing envelopes, running cables through mouse holes during trade show booth set-up, and sitting on the floor putting together gift bags for event guests. What’s most important is achieving the goal, not enjoying the view from the Ivory Tower.

How to get better: You probably can’t increase your budget. But you can preempt a lot of resource issues next year: with proper planning during the budget process you will ensure that you have the plan, people, and programs dollars in place to achieve your departmental commitments to the company’s revenue plan. The cliché “plan your work, and work your plan,” sounds hokey, but it’s not only wise, it’s the key to departmental efficiency and effectiveness.

That said, sometimes budgets get cut…. people change jobs… relocate with a spouse… go on maternity leave… even win the lottery. Your best-laid plans sometimes get tossed out the window for you. Like Cortes burning his ships, when tough times happen, you need to quickly reset priorities and reshuffle responsibilities on you team.

Spreading hardship isn’t easy, but sometimes it’s necessary. Over the years, I’ve seen this sort of thing happen a lot, so I’ve found it very helpful to recruit and hire people with a broader set of skills, not just in the specialized area for which I am hiring them. It’s incredibly valuable to have a graphic artist who’s also a photographer… a product marketing person who’s also a heckuva good copywriter… a technical writer who can also blog… a lead gen manager who can create his or her own email templates… the event manager who knows Adobe Creative Suite, etc. Mark my words: that kind of foresight and organizational versatility will save your neck someday.

9. Great Marketing Teams raise their game when the heat is on.

Despite their faux reputation for being masters of “soft skills,” the best marketing people I know are not prima donnas. They’re competitors. They take every aspect of marketing very seriously, and they take tremendous pride in seeing the business results of their work: more leads, more pipeline, and more revenue for the company. When challenges arise, they step up to face them head-on; they are the kind of people you want in a foxhole.

Once, I got involved with a company that, just prior to my coming aboard, had just relaunched its Website with disastrous results. It spent more money than I’d ever heard of being spent on a Website that completely missed the mark… messaging-wise and lead generation-wise. Worse, because of its underlying technology, the Company couldn’t make changes to it: it had to go back to the agency for any changes, only to learn that the agency had tossed their project over to a freelancer who didn’t even work for them. Modifications took forever, and the company was paying through the nose for them, like 25-40% of the original Website budget, every month. 

Worse, Marketing was paying for the Website fixes by gutting other marketing programs they’d planned. It was like a kidnapping where they’d paid the ransom, but hostage was still being held; kidnapping had turn into extortion, but the company was powerless to do anything about it.

After living with this for a few months, it became clear we need to cut our losses, and rebuild the site from scratch. The problem was, the technology budget had already been spent on the Website that failed; to pay for a new site, we had to underrun expenses on other programs and cannibalize the funds set aside for new headcount… meaning that not only did team members have to hold down the fort in their own jobs, they had pick up the increased workload for “new hires” that weren’t going to be hired after all. The cavalry wasn’t coming.

What happened next was one of the greatest examples of teamwork and “rising to the occasion” that I’d ever seen. Over the next several months – which, to make matters worse, coincided with the notoriously unproductive Q4 Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s stretch – key members of the team hunkered down and plowed through the projects in a way I’d never seen in a marketing team. Emails were flying about 24/7 (“Merry Christmas! Please review the proposed ‘About Us’ landing page copy!”), teammates were huddling together on weekends, everyone – even the support staff – got involved writing, proofreading, finding problems in the site nav… anything they could do to help. It was like watching one of those crazy time-lapse videos of a building being constructed, where in a few minutes, you can watch the progress on a project that really took months.

When the new site launched, it was amazing on every level. But what was most gratifying was the knowledge that, as a team, we’d become resilient; we could rise to an important, formidable challenge without breaking, complaining, or turning against one another. Everyone knew we were in a sucky situation that wasn’t their fault, but they resolved themselves to be pros, and plow through it… though few people outside the department understood how massive an undertaking it really was.

How to get better: Great Marketing Teams step up their games when the heat is on.

After taking time to scope the problem, like US Marines, they improvise, adapt, and overcome. They don’t freak out and point fingers; they work the problem… until suddenly, a challenge that was threatening peoples’ careers one day, becomes a fun story over beers the next.

Each member of the team steps up for different reasons: some because they thrive on the challenge and enjoy the recognition that follows; some because they are thrill seekers who are happiest in a crisis; some because they hate idea of a competitor getting the better of them. 

Some people will work themselves into the ground, and to the point where the quality of their work suffers. So Marketing leaders also have to possess emotional intelligence about how hard to push. While the department needs step up when the heat’s on, they also speak up when they are being pressed too hard. As Jean Luc Picard might Tweet, “If you’re always on Red Alert, it becomes meaningless.”

10. Great Marketing Teams are maniacal about quality, execution, deadlines, and budgets***

***In reality this should have come first. But that might have caused many people to stop reading, since nobody likes a lecture on basics like quality, execution, deadlines, and budgets. So I’m making it The Last Word... not because it’s my pet peeve, but because it really needs to be your team’s #1 priority: your reputation depends on it.

Quality and Execution: Not long ago, a member of a marketing team sent me a proposed press release she’d also sent directly to her CEO for approval. It was about an important deal between two companies, but if it were an assignment for a high school writing class, it would have flunked. I found more than a dozen mistakes in about three minutes. Not subjective stuff like word choice, but errors like misspellings (including the name of the other company), not knowing where to put the punctuation in her CEO’s quote, and interchangeably using indefinite pronouns, so it was unclear to whom statements were referring. It was shockingly bad, and I was embarrassed for her. And even more embarrassed when the CEO wrote back to her, copying me, saying “Watch the typos and grammar,” as though the CEO had nothing better to do than teach sixth grade English to someone who should know better, and care a lot more about the quality of her work and her reputation.

If you and your team are not producing the highest quality work, nothing else matters. Because nothing undercuts your professional reputation as badly as sending out work – either for internal review or worse, out-the-door – that contains typos, grammatical errors, or incorrect information (the wrong 800-number, incorrect dates and times, etc.)  

These types of sloppy errors force colleagues in other departments to question to question whether you’re up to the task: “if Marketing put the wrong date on the Webinar invite, what else are they getting wrong?” (Except colleagues in Finance: they will ask, “We are trusting these people with a budget?”)

We are working in an era where tools like Microsoft? Word automatically finds grammatical errors and fixes typos for you: it’s absolutely inexcusable that materials would ever leave the Marketing department without being completely mistake-free. Show some respect for yourself and your colleagues by taking the time to do things right.

Deadlines: The same goes with deadlines. It no secret that because marketing is frequently the final stage in linear corporate processes (like product launches), it’s like the last runner in the relay race: even if someone in another department drops the baton halfway through, marketing is the one going to held responsible if deadlines aren’t made. It comes with the job. So you need to have very strong processes, and close personal ties, with everyone on the relay team to ensure that all handoffs are going as scheduled… so you’re not stuck holding the bag. Yes, it stinks to be chasing last-minute rush jobs all the time. And yes, no one realizes the time we need to do things right. And yes, if we miss something, we’ll get called out on the carpet for it. That’s the nature of the profession. If it’s not your cup of tea, all I can say is maybe you should have chosen a different major in college… and fix the processes you can.

Budgets: Budgets are no different. Marketing is frequently one of the biggest lines in a company’s SG&A expenses; not only is marketing entrusted with large budgets, but in most cases, spending follows the recommendation made by the marketing team itself. If you can’t stick to your budget, by implication, it means there were some major flaws in your marketing plan (even if only the cost estimates.) And if the Marketing department can’t produce an error-free marketing plan… what’s your irreplaceable value?

Deep breath… and end of rant.

How to get better: It can get very frenetic in the marketing foxhole when a major project has everyone running around like their hair is on fire. That’s when mistakes happen… when you can least afford them.

And it’s when having good processes can absolutely save you.

• Work in teams, not in silos
• Develop and maintain a department calendar of events, campaign schedules, task lists, production schedule, etc. and review it every staff meeting
• Create a company style guide, to document how industry and company terminology should be used. It should include spellings of product names, trademarks, proper capitalization of titles, etc. (It would be smart, too, to document your company policies on employees’ social media usage; you want them posting, but not passing off their personal views as company policy.)
• Maintain boilerplate templates for frequently-needed written works such as the company history, timeline, and executive profiles. Have a standard “About Us” paragraph, and alternate versions that are 50, 100, and 250 words long, since you will need them for trade show directories, conference programs, and charity events with fixed word limits
• Always try to hire multi-skilled people: you might have the world’s greatest graphics designer on staff… but if he or she is heads-down on a project, it’s nice to have someone else in the department who knows how to use Adobe Creative Suite for an email blast
• Check one another’s work: make a rule that no written work leaves the department unless it is proofread by a fresh set of eyes; no PowerPoints for external use leave the department unless a graphics designer has tweaked them

Summary

Great Marketing Teams are part raw talent and part processes that showcase and optimize that talent… all the while, helping each team member improve their skills. 

Such teams are respected throughout their organizations; by building a reputation for doing industry-leading work, colleagues throughout your company will be receptive to Marketing’s desire to lead by building bridges to other departments. By being at the center of collaboration, the marketing team gets smarter, does better work, and delivers better results… and an upward spiral ensues.

But that reputation only comes when the Marketing team earns it with quality work, documentable results, and a can-do attitude that show in the marketplace and on the company’s bottom line.

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