Posted by Stephane Poirier on Thu, Jul 15, 2010
After 10 years of practice as a B2B marketing consultant, I’ve noticing a preoccupying situation within small and mid-sized B2B businesses (SMBs). This post will present an outline of that situation as well as provide a solution to the problem.
Many B2B SMBs don’t have a marketing department, which is to say, a team dedicated exclusively to the marketing functions of their company. Some employees get assigned some marketing tasks, but usually they have to perform other tasks as well, tasks like sales, customer service, or communication/copywriting. This is a fact.
Is this normal or worrisome?
SMBs spend important sums of money in various marketing activities, but their marketing spending / sales figures ratio is quite below that observed in high-performance companies. This is another fact.
What do we deduce from these two facts? That SMBs only practice ‘moderate’ marketing.
Success stories in marketing are not rare. You’ll most likely agree with me that success in business does not come from moderate efforts. Why then do so many SMBs adopt moderate practices when it comes to their marketing?
Many times, CEOs, Presidents, and other corporate leaders, have shared with me that this moderation stems from not being able to properly measure with precision the results of their marketing efforts, which creates doubt as to the results of their marketing effectiveness.
And when there is doubt, business managers abstain from practicing active and long term marketing. The most optimistic of business managers count on ‘trial and error’ and ‘learning by doing’ when it comes to optimising their marketing performance, the more pessimistic simply do it because their competitors do it, or to keep up their image, but they don’t expect any real results to come from their efforts.
Modern marketing has evolved a lot in the last decade and has become extremely efficient if done right. This being said, ‘modern’ marketing implies the mastery of many disciplines, disciplines that an employee who is assigned some marketing tasks, simply can’t master. The subject matter is too complex and it evolves too quickly.
For these reasons, if we think like an investor, moderation turns out to be bad decision. Moderate marketing simply can’t generate satisfactory results for a business.
What’s even more worrisome for the competitiveness and financial health of B2B SMBs is that the marketing money they do spend with moderation is often spent on the wrong things, or simply wasted altogether.
Waste? No! Really? Can it be? As a consultant, I’ve witnessed marketing practices that drain and progressively corrode a business’s profits and resources on countless occasions.
Here are 3 classic examples of marketing money spent wastefully:
- Focusing too much on market implementation activities to the detriment of analysis and strategic planning. Preferring to navigate by sight in a turbulent ocean without using sophisticated tools and methods that allow for the identification of the most interesting marketing opportunities.
- Action oriented marketing is good. Action without vision is bad.
- SMBs spend 2 to 3 times more on developing presentation tool (brochures, catalogues, web site window dressing, videos, etc) than they spend on market implementation. A presentation tool is simply that, a tool for sales activities, it cannot replace action, and more importantly, it doesn’t multiply action.
- Investing too much on appearance, makes us forget the essentials: Selling.
- Market implementation activities not integrated with sales efforts remain isolated activities that have only a small impact (like throwing a stone into the ocean). It can happen that isolated actions create a sudden interest toward your products… but without them being integrated with sales efforts, the prospects they generate are often neglected, even ignored.
- There is something worse than not being noticed: being labelled as an independent not interested in acquiring new clients
Insufficient investment to generate satisfactory results
Mismanagement of invested money that drains performance
Before such a realisation, there is cause for worry, don’t you think?
Without falling too much into religious metaphor, you can surely agree with me that in life it’s better to be a believer and to practice assiduously, than to practice only part-time, and half-heartedly at that.
Ten years ago, we tested a marketing management approach, and this approach turned out to be very profitable for our client. I’m talking about outsourced marketing.
Because our client outsourced his entire marketing department to us, he no longer had to worry about keeping up to date with the latest marketing practices. To this day that client still benefits from having a multi-disciplinary team of experts. With the money he saved on salaries by outsourcing his marketing department, he suddenly found that he had more manoeuvring room in his marketing budget, consequently that action allowed him to increase his marketing budget, and gave him the piece of mind that his money is being well spent.
Outsourced marketing, either completely or partially, is a financially profitable solution. It can even have a long term impact on the growth of your business.
In a future post, I’ll demonstrate the financial return on investment of outsourced B2B marketing, as well as the strategic advantages it brings to the table.
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Posted by Lynda St-Arneault on Wed, Jun 23, 2010
I'd like to address you, the B2B clients. You who hold marketing management positions at your businesses. And I'd like to speak to you, experts in Marketing. You who work on Strategic Planning, you who measure results in order to optimise them, you who are in charge of advising or coaching your clients.
Your role as an expert marketer makes you an integral part of the marketing functions of your clients. You don't simply act as a ‘provider' of services, but as a partner (which implies a certain complicity, loyalty, neutrality, and transparency).
If you, as a marketing specialist, have a passion for your work and your client, you want everything you do to work well, because if it works well for your client, that also works out well for you. You get paid for it to work! In fact, it is because you're an expert in your field that you got the job. Otherwise, your client wouldn't need you.
To what extent should we defend our points of view and still have things work out with a client?
In the scope of our work as marketing experts, we need to perform in order to keep a client.
To do that, we examine in detail the aspects of an issue at hand, and we advise our clients objectively, in a structured but creative and multidimensional manner (which stems from years or experience).
But sometimes, the right thing to do doesn't make everyone on the client side happy, and sometimes the right thing to do doesn't always take us down the road our client expects.
Sometimes internal politics, bruised egos (everyone thinks they're an expert in Marketing), and other such issues, take us to places that are very uncomfortable both professionally and interpersonally.
When these moments arrive, we have to defend the logic behind our recommendations (after all that's what we get paid for), but sometimes we end up surprised by just how big of an issue we create with our recommendations since the Human Factor becomes sometimes a major weight in our profession.
Hence, my question: To what extent should the Marketing Specialist be involved with their client?
Saying the things that need to be said while knowing that on the client side it might not be positively received? Or, compromise and simply remain content to provide half-measures in order not to create a ‘situation' that in all honesty shouldn't exist in a professional environment in the first place?
As an expert consultant, how far do you go? As a B2B business manager, how far do you want your expert consultants to go in their roles as marketing coaches?
At Exo, our position on the matter is absolute. We are passionate and we desire as much if not more for things work out well for our clients. We defend our points of view in order for our client to understand the reasons behind our recommendations.
We position ourselves as best as we can to eliminate all doubt as to our intentions, but we can't in all honesty do things halfway (in order to spare egos, fit into internal politics, etc) because, after all, we are expected to get results, and it will be us, ultimately, who will be judged and evaluated solely by the consequences of our actions.
So ... What's your opinion ?
What would be your position ?