In a congested global market for products and services, any company hoping to be successful in seducing prospective customers to its door needs to be excellent—if not world-class—at multichannel marketing campaigns.  Building a high-performing marketing machine is not for the feint hearted, and requires a blend of people, process, data, and technology that few companies possess. In this article, we expose the qualities marketing teams require if they are to optimize the effectiveness of their sales campaigns.

The big problem that silos of operation create

In most organizations, operational units designed to attract, win, delight and grow customers are fragmented into various departmental silos, with each led by its own boss.  The common substrates are sales, marketing, and customer service.  Of late, marketing teams have been further prized apart into digital and partner marketing (perhaps public relations too), and sales teams have been split between inside and field sales.  These aging organizational design models are singularly unhelpful to organizations that want to excel in customer experience.  And what organization nowadays—be it in the public or private sector—does not want to do that.

  • Dr Eli Goldratt got it completely right with his Theory of Constraints where he suggests that the core constraint of virtually every organization is that organizations are structured, measured and managed in parts, rather than as a whole. This results in lower-than-expected performance with constraints constantly shifting from one place to another and chronic conflicts between people representing different parts of the organization.  In some companies I’ve worked for, I’ve seen these customer facing departments totally at war with one another.  This inevitably leads to weak results.

Modern hybrid multi-channel B2B marketing demands more skills than you can shake a stick at

A challenge for any business is how to resource a modern marketing team.  Let’s consider what you’re going to need. 

 

First, you have the strategists and product managers that have to think through how to design and execute the perfect customer pitch and conversational path.  Then, you have the market researchers and data analysts needed to fuel the funnel; to scope and find the audiences. 

 

Now we move on to the creative and tech delivery teams—copywriters, video producers, graphic artists, full stack developers, web designers SEO experts, social media practitioners, etc.— to fuel the content.  And if that list of competencies wasn’t already long enough, no campaign will work without the outreach of salespeople.

The phases of a modern multi-channel marketing campaign

Sadly, even when you’ve herded up all those cats to bring together the skills you need, your marketing campaigns are unlikely to repeatedly churn out profitable leads unless they are highly targeted.  You will need a well-structured process; the key elements of which are described in the illustration below:

Strategy

Why the RUSH at the end matters

Here are three good reasons:

  1. ‘Production without Sales is Scrap.’ Most campaigns falter right at the end because the opportunities aren’t followed up.
  2. ‘Marginal gains add up.’ Nothing is ever guaranteed in marketing. You won’t ever know which marketing tool or channel really makes the difference until the very end of your campaign. Audiences vary in their communications preferences and sources. Smart marketers know it makes sense to spread your goodness across all available channels. The probability is your audience will see two or more articles, ads, etc. and this is likely to increase your conversation rates.

3. ‘It costs much less to follow up content than it does to create it.’  It’s a bizarre thing but many marketers work tirelessly on content, videos and websites, and fail dismally to follow up the threads of opportunity they surface.  It could be that sales today is seen as a second-class discipline.   It’s worth noting then that no business has ever succeeded without sales.

It’s a process like any other, but fragmenting it creates poor outcomes

On final thought about making your RUSH work out is to recognize that a process is only as strong as its weakest link; fail to validate each step in your process, and monitor its effectiveness, is likely to result in breaks in the chain-links that drive your process.  As a general tip, it’s always better to measure the links between process steps, not the steps themselves.