Top 10 Reasons Why Your Marketing Team is Failing You and How To Fix Them
My good friend Michael Cannon, who is the CEO of the Silver Bullet Group (www.silverbulletgroup.com), is clearly one of the top people in the industry that I believe consistently has the inside track on what Marketing organizations can do to be more effective. With his permission, I am presenting his article and hope that you, too, will become a follower of Michael and the Silver Bullet Group.
Top 10 Reasons Why Your Marketing Team Is Failing You and How to Fix Them Posted by MC in Uncategorized
By Michael Cannon
When you peel the onion back on why your marketing team is failing you, what you find is that the issues are focused primarily on four categories of marketing content:
- Customer-facing collateral (company website, brochures, videos, etc.)
- Demand generation (advertising, events, etc.)
- Internal-facing sales tools (competitive analysis, sales opportunity overviews, etc.)
- Sales support training (product, competitive, sales enablement, etc.)
When you peel down to another layer, what you see is that it’s rarely the content that’s the problem but rather the messaging in the content — or more specifically, the lack of effective messaging. The messaging is focused mostly on what your product does and includes, and how it works, instead of being focused on why your product is the best way to help your customers achieve their business objectives. It’s primarily descriptive, and not persuasive. Proof that most customer communication (content and sales conversations) is ineffective can be seen in over a decade of research reports and is summarized in the following benchmark data:
- Over 50% of your marketing and sales communications aren’t relevant to your customer
- More than 70% of your marketing content isn’t relevant to your sales teams
Just for a moment, consider these data points and the cost burden they place on your P&L. Even if your organization is 10% to 20% better than the average, the cost is too high, and avoidable.
Top 10 Reasons Why Marketing Is Failing
When you peel the onion back yet another layer and ask, ”Why is it that most of the messaging in Marketing’s content is not relevant or useful?”, the following items emerge:
- Poor visibility into the true cost of ineffective customer communication
- Lack of clear differentiation among messaging, content, and conversations
- Inaccurate model of the categories, styles, and types of messaging required for market success
- Misguided priority setting
- Erroneous business model for allocating sales and marketing resources
- Ineffective new-product development process or commercialization process
- Lack of method and skills to create persuasive messaging
- Poor alignment around the definition, rating, hand-off, follow-up, and reporting of leads
- Limited sales experience
- Lack of a formal feedback loop from Sales, a.k.a. content usage and rating system, to understand what is working, what is not, and “why?”
An additional reason is that executive leadership manages Marketing primarily on the quantity of content produced rather than the effectiveness of the content. For a description of the first nine reasons and their solutions, read “9 Strategies to Increase Marketing Effectiveness” A sales portal with basic content-management functionality resolves reason #10. What do you think is the best way to change how executive leadership manages the marketing function? What’s on your top 10 list?
Thank you Michael for your contribution this week. I also encourage my reader to watch my newest video on YouTube that deals with some of the same issues listed above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7snyEM0NvIk .
That’s the way I see it. What say you?