Does your marketing team have the right stuff?

The 1979 book (Tom Wolfe) and 1983 movie (Philip Kaufman), The Right Stuff chronicled the transition from breaking the sound barrier to the Mercury space expeditions. The book and subsequent movie explored why the Mercury astronauts accepted the danger of space flight and the mental and physical skills required of them to do their job, that is the right stuff. The inspirational story provided insight into the character and caliber of these dedicated professionals. The current economic challenges and ever-present market dynamics beg the question for companies of all types, “Does Our Marketing Team have the Right Stuff?”

Here are four skills and four tools, the right stuff that will enable every marketing organization to fulfill the charter to be a business driver.

Enhancing the skills of existing talent
Regardless of company size and industry, marketing teams (whether a team of one or more) are under increased pressure to drive top-line growth and profitable revenue.  For many organizations this means acquiring new skills related to marketing performance measurement and management, analytics, benchmarking, and customer engagement. Let’s review these four specific skills every marketer should have under their belt.

Metrics and performance target setting – with greater demand for marketing to be more accountable, solid metrics, performance target setting, measurement and reporting skills are a must. Be sure your marketing folks know how to set measurable goals and track results.

Analytics – the ability to derive insights from data. If growing valuable customer relationships and being able to forecast sales from future marketing activities are important, then analytics ought to be among your marketer’s top skills.

Benchmarking – the process of comparing what your company does to another that is widely considered to be an industry standard or best practice. If you don’t know what the standard how will you know what to strive for when it comes to such things as win/loss ratios, marketing key performance indicators, share of preference, product adoption rates, and so on. Benchmarks are essential to any organization that believes continuous improvement is critical to the pursuit of excellence.

Customer Experience Management – If business exists to produce and serve a customer and marketing’s job is to create, communicate and deliver value to customers, then marketing is your organization’s ultimate steward of the customer experience. Marketers need to be sure they have the skills necessary to improve customer engagement and touch point effectiveness, respond to changes in the buying cycle, and conduct voice-of-customer research in order to retain customers, create loyalty, and transform customers into advocates for the company.

Driving operational efficiencies
Marketing operations refers to infrastructure, that is, the tools, systems and processes in place to facilitate customer-centricity.  For many organizations achieving these operational efficiencies requires infrastructure changes and improvements. With limited resources, where can you get the best bang for your buck? Here are four areas for investment consideration.

Operational Process Alignment – When was the last time you mapped your operational processes and verified marketing alignment with the sales, product, service, and other parts of the business?  All of us get into routines and habits. How many times have you said something such as, “that’s the way we do it here?” Reviewing processes and updating them may be time consuming, but if you are looking for ways to reduce inefficiencies internally, this is necessary step.

Market/Business Intelligence – There is an art and science to using external information to drive business strategy. Business intelligence applications enable the collection, integration, analysis and presentation of competitive, channel, product and customer information to derive trends and insights. The value of having such a tool is that when used properly it enables you to begin to conduct scenario analysis and anticipate the future. With the insights derived from business intelligence there is the potential to anticipate the development of new markets, technological turning points, and how competitors will react.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – If the marketing organization is responsible for the relationship between the company and the customer, then it stands to reason the organization needs tools to facilitate this relationship. CRM systems automate the processes an organization uses to organize and tracks contact with its current and prospective customers. As you can see from this definition CRM is both a process and a tool. There are a range of CRM tools, so selecting the right one can be a daunting task. Even so, in today’s environment a company can’t afford to operate without a formal approach to customer relationship management. Of course, once you have the tool the next biggest hurdle is using it.

Performance Management – The ability to use analytics, reporting, and dashboards to assess marketing’s effectiveness, efficiency, financial contribution, and progress toward achieving predetermined goals is performance management.  This means marketing needs to be able to report on performance, impact and ROI from the program level up.

Progress doesn’t come without missteps, misfires and failures.  Winners look for ways to overcome challenges and continuously improve. They seek outside help, new ideas and new skills. In Wolfe’s story, the national heroes of the Mercury space program were not necessarily the truest and best, what they possessed was the right stuff, the skill and courage to “push the outside of the envelope.” Does your marketing team have the right stuff?

VisionEdge Marketing, Inc, is a leading data-driven metrics-based strategic and product marketing firm located in Austin, Texas. The company specializes in consulting and learning services that help organizations use data to make fact based decisions to address market, customer, and product opportunities and to improve and measure marketing performance. For more information, go to www.visionedgemarketing.com.