It's that time of year-2014 budget planning has taken over your life. Both your CEO & CFO are pushing back on your 2014 marketing budget requests because they don't think the marketing dollars you spent in 2013 worked.
They're asking tough questions about what return on investment the company received for the 2013 investment in marketing-questions for which you don't have great answers:
- How many leads did marketing generate for the sales team? Why didn't you generate more?
- How much was the cost per lead? Why was it so high?
- What was the ROI on the trade shows that we invested in? Are they really worth it?
- What was the % of deals closed that were due to marketing's contribution?
- What are you going to do differently in 2014 to contribute to help sales hit their numbers?
Beneath the bravado, you are secretly thinking to yourself that "I know my marketing is broken-what do I do?" You've done things one way for a long time and the thought of trying new modern marketing techniques is a bit frightening. You're thinking to yourself, "I know I have to make some changes-but how do you get started?"
2014 is the year you figure out how to start transforming your marketing department by adopting modern marketing principles that are in synch with how modern buyers buy. Time to reallocate those dollars that you know are no longer working and invest in areas that are more effective.
We all know that buyers are now spending more and more of their time online getting educated about products and services on their own. In fact, buyers now collect 60-75% of the information they need to make a purchase decision before they ever talk to your sales people.
Given this new reality, have you figured out how to maximize the power of your website-to turn it into a lead generation machine for your sales team? Start the move to modern marketing by implementing these steps:
1. Get organizationally aligned with sales->agree on terminology and implement a bi-directional SLA
2. Redefine your team's marketing roles to reflect skills needed for modern marketing
3. Reallocate marketing resources into new channels
4. Set up closed loop reporting->connect the marketing and sales databases to measure results
In the next series of blog posts, I will outline how to complete these steps and also discuss what some of the challenges are for Enterprises to move to a modern marketing approach.
