Opinion
If I have to go to another meeting about ‘awareness’ I’ll go nuts! Marketing budgets come straight after training when cuts have to be made, and at the risk of upsetting my peers, I’ll come out with the unspoken truth. They should! Certain aspects of the “credit crunch” have been a long overdue correction in the financial markets. The current reductions in marketing spend are also correcting an imbalance, and therein lies a great opportunity. Have I gone crazy? I’m sure most of the marketing fraternity think that I have.
The popular mantra amongst marketing and business consultants right now is that you should be investing more in marketing whilst your competitors can’t or won’t. But when I look around at marketing budgets I see great potential for cuts, without negatively impacting the bottom-line, and with the potential to improve it. So how can we have this mythical “best of both worlds”? The answer lies in your spreadsheet programme, in Microsoft Excel. I’m presented with several marketing plans each week, most of which are provided to me in MS Word, or even PowerPoint. I hope you can see where I’m headed with this, and hopefully it will explain the great marketing dichotomy. Frankly, the best creative minds often have little time for numbers, and why should they? People ought to focus on their strengths, and that is why I would argue that when you appoint a Marketing Director, they should not be a creative. They should understand the creatives, be able to manage, inspire, and motivate them, but they should not be primarily creative themselves.
Ideally they should have a background in sales! Marketers often forget that they have only ONE job.
That job is to feed Sales. I don’t care who’s aware of your product, I only care that they buy it! Awareness campaigns can drive sales, in fact they’re critical to it, but if that’s the case, why do so many fail? I believe it all starts at the beginning, with the strategy, and by that I mean a financial strategy. Know what you’re spending and what the return will be. Have benchmarks on that return, have realistic timescales for measurement, and quantification of success, Make sure your campaigns are isolated from each other sufficiently well so that they can be individually measured. Many campaigns go out to audiences that are too wide, well beyond those who will actually purchase the product, or have the capability to do so. This lack of financial planning, coupled with a lack of ROI targets, is the prime cause of the problem. Anyone in marketing can provide me with a spreadsheet showing the costs, but most go strangely quiet when I demand the spreadsheet showing forecast returns. Anyone targeted on sales would be focused like a laser on the right markets. It’s bred into them, and we must extend this trait to marketing too. We’re in a situation where people have a budget, and far too often that has not been tied to a return.
This is why you can cut your marketing budget and still increase your bottom line sales.
In most firms I’ve dealt with I find that aspects of the marketing spend are simply not necessary, or at the very least are used inefficiently when the same funds could produce more customers. So how did we end up with this situation, where individuals are rewarded based on what they want to spend, as opposed to targeted returns? Regrettably, my experience of marketing directors has been that as far as many are concerned sales is a necessary evil, tolerated only because it provides the pay check! Darrell Kofkin, who writes for us elsewhere in this issue, believes that we need more marketers in the boardroom. I agree with him, but I also believe that one of the issues holding marketers back is an under-appreciation of sales. If you don’t think there’s a problem, here’s some evidence.
I just Googled ‘Marketing Director jobs’, to see how many mentioned sales as part of required experience. These are positions averaging £60,000 per annum and typically giving control of a large budget, yet only one in five advertisements mentioned sales at all. In the other four there is no requirement for a sales background, and more frighteningly, no mention of sales at all in the detailed job descriptions. How on earth can we expect our marketers to deliver the right prospects to our sales teams when we are hiring people with no sales experience? In sales you live or die by your results, in marketing it’s far more opaque. I’ve seen inadequates keep the board going for months with “we’re building awareness, we’re building awareness” only to see that awareness lead to no discernable value for the business. If it cost more than it made, it was a mistake, and often it could have been avoided! If you want a better bang for your marketing buck, and to make better use of your budget, here’s my 5-point plan:
1. The role of a Marketing Director is to lead a creative team, put forward to the board ideas and strategies that he or she believes will provide the best return on investment, and back those up with spreadsheets containing real figures that they can be measured against. Hire this person.
2. If, as many firms in this climate are doing, you hire a joint “Sales and Marketing Director” make sure that they have strong sales experience, and demonstrable success, otherwise you may be heading for a fall.
3. A relatively small amount of money spent researching current and future market trends will reap dividends.
4. When planning campaigns remember that the market has changed, and indeed always changes. Be sure the people you are targeting still have the want, need, and budget to buy your product. When hiring a creative agency, ask them for ROI case studies, and scrutinise them carefully. If they can’t provide them, if they don’t add-up, or if the correlation between the sales and marketing is not conclusive, find another agency.
5. Remember the golden rule. Marketing exists to feed Sales. If your marketing team disagree with this, replace them with people drafted in from sales!
Rhidian Jones is a contributing editor to Business First and CEO of Route-to-Market Ltd www.r2m.info To violently disagree with this article email rhidian.jones@businessfirstmagazine.co.uk
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The popular mantra amongst marketing and business consultants right now is that you should be investing more in marketing whilst your competitors can’t or won’t. But when I look around at marketing budgets I see great potential for cuts, without negatively impacting the bottom-line, and with the potential to improve it. So how can we have this mythical “best of both worlds”? The answer lies in your spreadsheet programme, in Microsoft Excel. I’m presented with several marketing plans each week, most of which are provided to me in MS Word, or even PowerPoint. I hope you can see where I’m headed with this, and hopefully it will explain the great marketing dichotomy. Frankly, the best creative minds often have little time for numbers, and why should they? People ought to focus on their strengths, and that is why I would argue that when you appoint a Marketing Director, they should not be a creative. They should understand the creatives, be able to manage, inspire, and motivate them, but they should not be primarily creative themselves.
Ideally they should have a background in sales! Marketers often forget that they have only ONE job.
That job is to feed Sales. I don’t care who’s aware of your product, I only care that they buy it! Awareness campaigns can drive sales, in fact they’re critical to it, but if that’s the case, why do so many fail? I believe it all starts at the beginning, with the strategy, and by that I mean a financial strategy. Know what you’re spending and what the return will be. Have benchmarks on that return, have realistic timescales for measurement, and quantification of success, Make sure your campaigns are isolated from each other sufficiently well so that they can be individually measured. Many campaigns go out to audiences that are too wide, well beyond those who will actually purchase the product, or have the capability to do so. This lack of financial planning, coupled with a lack of ROI targets, is the prime cause of the problem. Anyone in marketing can provide me with a spreadsheet showing the costs, but most go strangely quiet when I demand the spreadsheet showing forecast returns. Anyone targeted on sales would be focused like a laser on the right markets. It’s bred into them, and we must extend this trait to marketing too. We’re in a situation where people have a budget, and far too often that has not been tied to a return.
This is why you can cut your marketing budget and still increase your bottom line sales.
In most firms I’ve dealt with I find that aspects of the marketing spend are simply not necessary, or at the very least are used inefficiently when the same funds could produce more customers. So how did we end up with this situation, where individuals are rewarded based on what they want to spend, as opposed to targeted returns? Regrettably, my experience of marketing directors has been that as far as many are concerned sales is a necessary evil, tolerated only because it provides the pay check! Darrell Kofkin, who writes for us elsewhere in this issue, believes that we need more marketers in the boardroom. I agree with him, but I also believe that one of the issues holding marketers back is an under-appreciation of sales. If you don’t think there’s a problem, here’s some evidence.
I just Googled ‘Marketing Director jobs’, to see how many mentioned sales as part of required experience. These are positions averaging £60,000 per annum and typically giving control of a large budget, yet only one in five advertisements mentioned sales at all. In the other four there is no requirement for a sales background, and more frighteningly, no mention of sales at all in the detailed job descriptions. How on earth can we expect our marketers to deliver the right prospects to our sales teams when we are hiring people with no sales experience? In sales you live or die by your results, in marketing it’s far more opaque. I’ve seen inadequates keep the board going for months with “we’re building awareness, we’re building awareness” only to see that awareness lead to no discernable value for the business. If it cost more than it made, it was a mistake, and often it could have been avoided! If you want a better bang for your marketing buck, and to make better use of your budget, here’s my 5-point plan:
1. The role of a Marketing Director is to lead a creative team, put forward to the board ideas and strategies that he or she believes will provide the best return on investment, and back those up with spreadsheets containing real figures that they can be measured against. Hire this person.
2. If, as many firms in this climate are doing, you hire a joint “Sales and Marketing Director” make sure that they have strong sales experience, and demonstrable success, otherwise you may be heading for a fall.
3. A relatively small amount of money spent researching current and future market trends will reap dividends.
4. When planning campaigns remember that the market has changed, and indeed always changes. Be sure the people you are targeting still have the want, need, and budget to buy your product. When hiring a creative agency, ask them for ROI case studies, and scrutinise them carefully. If they can’t provide them, if they don’t add-up, or if the correlation between the sales and marketing is not conclusive, find another agency.
5. Remember the golden rule. Marketing exists to feed Sales. If your marketing team disagree with this, replace them with people drafted in from sales!
Rhidian Jones is a contributing editor to Business First and CEO of Route-to-Market Ltd www.r2m.info To violently disagree with this article email rhidian.jones@businessfirstmagazine.co.uk
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