The Marketing & Sales Enablement

"More than 80 percent of marketers’ time is spent managing the various activities associated with executing a marketing program or campaign. Most of these people are fire-fighters, working to control the conflagrations that flare up continually in marketing activities. This leaves them little time for doing the critical strategic work, such as brand architecting, portfolio management and new product development. As a result, the quality of their output and the success rate of their marketing activities suffer".  

Naveen Jain and Marianne Seiler, Accenture

This quote reminds me of all those marketers who are busy with organizing instead of planning. We see them driving in station cars, carrying around a  pop-up wall, sweating and cursing because “Sales is toc dammed lazy to do it”.

They should not blame Sales, but themselves. Sometimes I have the impression that they do all this kind of work as it is a good escape not to go for the difficult part of their work. Marketing is not easy and some people are just happy not to think about the essential steps to be taken in an effective marketing plan.

“To get started, marketers should begin by breaking the entire “revenue cycle” into stages (just as the sales team does for the sales cycle). For example, these stages could include the spectrum from “raw names” to “engaged” to “in-profile prospect” to “marketing lead” to “sales qualified lead” to “sales accepted opportunity” to “won business”. By formally defining each of these individual stages, as well as the business rules that determine when a prospect moves from one stage to the next, marketers can begin to understand the dynamics of how prospects flow through the pipeline over time.

Armed with this knowledge, marketers can then use marketing analytics to start making forecasts about how prospects will flow in the future. They can also determine how the company's marketing investments today will drive pipeline and revenue tomorrow and help their own department's prospects in the process.

Marketers that do this are in a great position to improve their organization's revenue performance, to justify and protect their own marketing budgets, and to increase their personal power and credibility within the corporate structure”.

Jon Miller, VP, marketing and cofounder, Marketo

When you still have some energy left, start running...in your private life!

Johan Jonker