Last week, a Gartner article made its way around our office. It was titled “If I Had A Million Dollars,” so it obviously drew the attention of our sales reps. One took it to heart though, and questioned whether these marketing investments would be worth it if they weren’t executed properly.
The author suggests a number of marketing investments he would make with a budget increase of $1 million, naming things such as “hire a rock star head of product marketing” and “beef up sales enablement.” But Seismic Sales Director Colin Craig brought up a few issues with these investments. He claimed that a marketing team still may not see success even if the $1 million was spent productively. Each bullet point below is something that the article’s author said he would do with $1 million, and the question that follows is an example of how Colin saw each investment potentially failing.
What happens if you:
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Hire a rock star head of product marketing…
…But the field won’t use or cannot access your latest content?
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Better understand customers and how they want to buy…
…But you don’t use this knowledge to offer personalized communications?
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Utilize predictive analytics…
…But once you identify the right prospects, your content doesn’t resonate with their needs?
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Beef up sales enablement…
…But sales cannot access or customize content from any platform or device?
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Create more case studies…
…But marketing spends too much time updating, managing and delivering them to the field?
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Commission a survey…
…But the survey isn’t dynamic, can’t pose questions applicable to a specific audience, or capture the right information?
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Double down on the right content and activities…
…But your system cannot offer the right content, for the right prospect at the right time?
These are real issues that plague marketing teams who think they might be doing everything right. The reality is that the majority of companies still:
– manually update all presentations and content each time new data is available
– don’t have the right insights about how content is being used by reps and customers
– aren’t personalizing content for each specific sales conversation
But it doesn’t take $1 million to fix these problems. It can be as simple as revisiting your content updating and personalization processes, assessing the efficiency of these processes, and finding a way to reduce the time spent on these processes from days to minutes. Enable your marketing team to be nimble, powerful and efficient by giving them the tools they need to succeed.
