B2B marketers used to be responsible for communication and branding. In the past, B2B marketers were responsible for branding and communications.
The skills required did not change very often. It was difficult to measure ROI, and marketing was viewed as” a “must-do” function. When the organization’s budget was tight, the first thing to be cut was marketing.
When the Web was created, everything changed.
Marketers today are responsible for a wide range of tasks, including technology, Demand Generation (demand generation), branding, communications and PR, AR (augmented reality), content creation, thought leadership, and sales enablement. Company leaders expect marketers to track their impact on revenue and pipeline.
The marketing teams must prove that they have a huge pipeline of leads for the business, yet these teams struggle more than ever.
According to a MarketingWeek.com survey, more than half (53.8%) of marketers say they have no marketing-related academic qualifications or professional certifications. Of those who said they had a marketing degree, only 32.2% thought it was very useful. It’s not surprising that marketing changes so quickly. Marketing professionals must decide if the new platforms and strategies that are constantly emerging are strategic for their business.
Marketing is the only department that requires regular, defined, and measurable training.
What are the consequences of not strategically training your marketing team?
By examining the business’s overall challenges, an organization can identify the cracks within its marketing team and how those cracks impact the business.
The marketing team has the highest turnover in any organizatiCMOs’MOs’ tenure is shockingly short compared to their C-Suite counterparts.
Other challenges include organizations’ inability to differentiate themselves from their competitors, low-quality leads, and long closing times. These deals are based on price reductions, poor customer retention, and misalignment between sales and marketing.
Even though they know all this, organizations still seem reluctant to invest the same amount of time and money in training marketing teams as they do in training sales teams.
Both are essential to the company’s revenue generation engine. Marketing is also responsible for setting the external narrative of your compaHere’sre’s a quick breakdown of some of the challenges previously mentioned:
- Marketing Team Turnover can cost your company significant amounts of money, both in rehiring and retraining, not to mention the knowledge that is lost.
- A failure to differentiate can be a problem of positioning, messaging, and branding. The marketing team usually spearheads differentiation strategies.
- Lead quality can be a direct outcome of the efforts made by your demand generation team.
- A longer time to close indicates that your prospects do not see the value of making your solution their priority. Marketing and Sales must work together to fix this. But guess who provides the stories for sales?
- A price war can indicate that your products are not positioned correctly, or that haven’ten’t identified the right market segment.
- Low customer retention can be a Customer Experience issue. Marketing is often asked for help in addressing CX.
- A misalignment of Sales and Marketing could ruin your B2B pipeline and deal.
- The inability to measure marketing effectiveness (or to measure the right thing) can lead to layoffs and budget cuts within the marketing department, which can create a downward spiral, driving profits down.
Each of these issues is complex and can be discussed in depth, but it should be clear that marketing teams…
- You are asked to do many things
- Directly impaccompany’sny’s growth and revenue
- You are under greater pressure than any other team in your company to learn new things quickly and determine if they fit with the overall strategy.
- What is the most visible part of your company?
don’ton’t we give marketers all the tools and training that they need to be successful?
Even if you think that your marketing team is being trained.
Most organizations train their marketing teams in this way: The marketing leaders allocate a budget to employee development and then let each team member decide what to do with it. The team members may attend an event or a class, that’sat’s all they get to learn.
What are the possible problems?
- This type of learning is not aligned with the goals and objectives of the company (or even the goals set by the marketing team); instead, it focuses more on individual growth than team development.
- There is no way to know if the money and time spent on marketing, however little, will have any effeIt’sIt’s impossible to tell if your team is learning the same method because of this bottom-up educatiIt’sIt’s possible that they could return from training with contradictory approaches.
A leader may also bring the team together in a workshop to learn new skills. This is a better strategy solution, but it doesn’t solve the problem of sustained learning. It does not help the team grow in areas where it is weak.
You may have many variations of these scenarios, but they all share a common theme: You’re spending a lot of time and effort training your sales team and then wondering why you don’t see the results you desire.
Your marketing team should receive the same intensive and dedicated training as your sales team.
To solve B2B’s most pressing business challenges, it is critical to use assessments, learning pathways, and a wide range of modern learning methods and carefully measure the training’s impact on the business.
I would argue that marketing has a greater impact on your business than sales. Your marketing team is the first voice your prospects will hear, and your sateam’sam’s success is based on the customer experience and stories that your marketing team provides.