Embark on a journey to marketing mastery with these five guiding principles: 𝟭. 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻: Lay the foundation for success by crafting a comprehensive strategy tailored to your goals and audience. 𝟮. 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: Harness the power of data and insights to inform your decisions, ensuring every move is purposeful and effective. 𝟯. 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆: Invest in marketing as a priority within your budget, recognizing its pivotal role in driving growth and visibility. 𝟰. 𝗖𝗮𝗻-𝗱𝗼 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲: Embrace a mindset of experimentation, learning, and adaptation, turning challenges into opportunities for innovation and growth. 𝟱. 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: Commit to staying ahead of the curve by staying informed about the latest industry trends and refining your skills through ongoing education and exploration. Ready to elevate your marketing game?
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Last month I spoke with Dan Flynn, CEO of Skyhawk Sales Consultants Inc., on how to set up a successful sales team.
CategoriesLack of Learning. We all make mistakes. Some campaigns work, others don’t. It is how you handle that information and apply it that is critical.
Fear of Failure. Marketing is about taking intelligent risks to grow the business. Learn more about becoming comfortable being uncomfortable.
Underspending. Too often, organizations underspend on marketing and limit their ability to achieve specific goals. This segment touches on how to properly think about and allocate marketing dollars.
Living in a vacuum is a problem faced by companies small and large, alike. Making decisions without proper intelligence gathering may be faster, but you are shooting in the dark and hoping to hit the target. Build better active intelligence gathering processes and utilize logic tree decision making to yield better decisions.
Another one of my favorite books and a process I often bring to my clients is detailed in "The 4 Disciplines of Execution" by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling.
The four disciplines or 4DX is focused on helping organizations achieve their strategic goals. The key points include: 1. Focus on the Wildly Important: Prioritize a small number of critical objectives that will have a significant impact on the organization's success. This is key as it is easy to simply get bogged-down in every tasks. Moreover, by selecting a small number of critical objectives that will move the needle it helps avoid being spread too thin. 2. Act on the Lead Measures: Identify and focus on the specific actions (lead measures) that will influence the achievement of the chosen goals. These are proactive measures that drive success. In other words, if your lead measure for increased sales is X phone calls per week to potential customers and you focus on that, then the lag measure, sales dollars, will take care of itself. 3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: Create a visible and engaging scoreboard that tracks progress toward the goals. This helps in maintaining motivation, transparency, and a sense of accountability among team members. The bottom line is that we all perform better when we are being visibly tracked and there is a sense of competition. 4. Create a Cadence of Accountability: Establish regular meetings and routines for team members to report on their commitments and progress. This ensures that everyone is aligned and accountable for their contributions to the shared objectives. Accountability breeds enhanced performance. I like to tell my clients that I want them to become comfortable being slightly uncomfortable. Not so uncomfortable that they are not sleeping at night, but enough that they feel just a touch uncertain as to what is going to work and what won’t. The reality is we don’t know. My job is to take all the information and data I have and make educated guesses. Sometimes, I am 100%. Other times, the market shifts or a competitor does something unforeseen, and the initiative misses its target. There are a number of extraneous variables, outside your direct control, that can influence the success or failure of your marketing plan. The best you can do is be aware and be nimble. You should plan for such potential shifts with regular review meetings. Depending on the complexity of your plan and how truncated the sales cycle is (some companies do a majority of their sales in one quarter), you will want to have these meetings monthly or quarterly.
During these meetings you will want to accomplish the following:
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