It is no secret that B2B businesses are unhappy with their digital marketing performance, as well as the talent that runs their sales and marketing operations. With digital leadership revolving in-and-out of roles every two years, on average, the Houston market continues to struggle to implement and maintain a comprehensive sales and marketing initiative that can scale alongside an organization’s operation.
Among the software and technology hurdles are the everyday basic issues of handling prospects from lead, to nurturing, to conversion, and later – client management. Today’s sales force is struggling with touching a given number of leads – with the frequency needed to convert them into a sale using their present sales and marketing process. On the flip side, marketing heads find themselves overwhelmed with the lack of software integration needed to develop a sound marketing strategy. As an example, businesses typically use an email service that is not connected to their CRM and the CRM is not connected to their lead generation service, making collecting, reporting and campaign optimization messy and ultimately ineffective. The success of smart marketing is predicated on the qualitative data collected at the client/customer point of entry. The marketing head may also be the wrong fit because of assumptions made by the hiring process.
“Why the revolving talent and the inability to get marketing to stick?”
There are two major areas that need to be addressed to begin building a sophisticated and effective marketing program.
- Business owners/leaders need to not base hiring decision on assumptions and
- Human resources/recruiters, in most cases, lack the digital experience and understanding of how digital marketing functions, both operationally and in the sales process. These areas are complex in nature and need a bottom-up evaluation by qualified personnel with technical experience.
Business leaders tend to follow the crowd when in comes to marketing. Who has the time to do the leg-work when you’re trying to run a company? It is much easier and more time efficient to copy the competition. But what if the competition is doing the same thing you are doing? How do you know what they have done is effective? With 89% of B2B executives stating that their marketing initiatives are not working, we can be sure they are also making marketing decisions based on assumptions.
“Why did you go ahead and hire a social media manager?”
“Why did you commit to that digital agency’s expensive retainer?”
This well-intentioned seed, once planted, quickly grows into a weed that chokes not only the marketing budget but also negatively affects operations and existing clients. Assumptions are dangerous because they are easily covered up by the soil of busy work like getting social media campaigns up and running, implementing expensive CRM initiatives and spamming email lists with promotions and brand awareness.
To begin, business leaders must look for digital marketing professionals who have been in the trenches. The digital talent must possess a solid focus on B2B, strong partnerships with sales and operations, at least 10 years’ experience in diverse industries, intimate working knowledge of CRM systems and inbound marketing programs, as well as client management, and the ability to be hands-on is critical, especially when the talent is charged with getting the marketing department off the ground. You don’t want someone who is just going to outsource work. He or she must be able to handle, develop and orchestrate the cacophony of digital work and processes needed to create a sustainable and effective marketing effort.
An evaluation of your organization, how you operate, what you sell and how you maintain client relationships needs to be thoroughly understood with processes mapped out so that you can begin to see a clear picture of how sales & marketing will fit into the picture. Once the appropriate marketing head is in place, he or she will then begin to hire the most appropriate talent to support the marketing initiative as well.
The question of what comes first, the chicken or the egg, is louder than ever before. The obvious answer is, the chicken.
BIC RECRUITING has bolstered highly sought-after B2B digital marketing talent to its recruiting armament in order to help organizations to work through past assumptions, evaluate current operations and begin building and/or restructuring your digital marketing department by placing the most appropriate digital talent.