The situation
You are the CEO or commercial leader of a company that mostly sells B2B. The business has been around for a few decades or more, business is good, but not as it used to be. It’s no longer about selling to the people you know, increasing prices and launching new versions of your best selling products. Marges are under pressure and growth doesn’t come automatically anymore. Sales say the know what’s going on and it’s mostly about lack of sales support or lack of competitive products.
You’ve probably found out you need to change stuff, your decentralised marketing teams are working against each other, making flyers for sales, running promo’s that lose money and no one actually figured out this whole online thing, e-commerce or selling to Amazon. Maybe you want to go into software and/or solution selling, is your marketing team not able to catch up with all the acquisitions you’re doing.
The problem
There’s no aligned marketing strategy derived from your overall product/sales strategy. The team is unaware of their incompetence. Sales has always run the show and has hidden pockets of marketing folks (sales support) in all their teams. The local GM’s love it they have someone to do all their local events. While you have a group in IT rolling out a CRM system, adoption varies across your regions and no one in marketing is able to or actually asked to prove ROI of their campaigns and events.
There is no single marketing team rolling out the plans that are aligned between leadership, the product orgnization and the commercial teams. There’s is no clear idea on who owns what, there are no KPIs, no clear accountability to demand generation and 0 ownership.
And because there’s no plan, no structure, there’s a good chance you’re probably not employing the right people – not due to their fault. You have no clue on capabilities and skills you have, what you need today and what you actually need for your strategy moving forward.
Mark’s Marketing Transformation
Strategy
It all starts knowing where you are and where you are going. Use Hoshin Kanri and actual conversations to prioritise ideas and initiatives.
Structure
To be able to execute you need a solid structure in your organisation, KPIs and how the teams work together. Map out hi-level value streams, set KPIs, deploy SLA’s (eg Marketing and Sales alignment).
People
Map out the capabilities and skill sets you need. Assess your current team, identify your talent and your gaps. Build a plan to retain and rehire. Build a talent funnel and succession charts for key roles.
Execution
With teams in place, drive Daily and Visual Management with strong Problem solving. Implement lean, agile and/or scrum workflows to double the output in half the time.
Let’s schedule a first meeting to assess
So, how does Marketing Transformation work?
If you are ready for a Marketing Transformation, we can have a chat on how to go through the four steps (strategy, structure, people and execution). Ideally this would be a longer term project / interim thing. I can act as a coach for your CMO/VP Marketing or I can take on the role as an interim, while I help you recruit your the final person.
For all these steps, I have a suite of templates and tools. Depending on the current speed of your organisation, the state of your leadership, your commercial teams and your tech stack, this will take between 9 and 15 months (in my experience). We can go faster if you can go faster.
Let’s just have a chat, align on what you see and formulate where you want to go.