How to coach marketers to be more successful

When you hire a marketing professional, you have high hopes. They will solve all of your sales and marketing problems - right? Actually, wrong. It's a team effort but marketing is responsible for lead generation and to that end, their job is to develop marketing strategies that result in quality leads being given to sales teams.

To get the most our of marketers, it's important to be on the same page:

Set clear and concise expectations of your marketing team

By setting your expectations upfront, a marketing professional will be able to easily identify whether or not they are realistic and what KPI's, benchmarking and time frames goals can be delivered. Also provide expectations that you have of your marketing team (or marketer) in writing ensuring that there is no misinterpretation of expectations.

Encourage the use of technology

Technology will help marketers work faster, smarter and harder - so it is imperative that you give marketers the tools they need to maximise the use of their time. When we look at a basic marketing suite, it's important to include:

• Marketing Strategy Technology: Technology that drives sales and marketing strategies ensuring that data-driven strategies are providing less hit and miss and better use of marketing budget. We use Robotic Marketer as this is the only tool available on the market today that provides a good cross section of market and customer insights, competitor information, indepth analysis of digital performance and exactly what you need to improve your marketing capabilities through tactics and actions.
• Email Marketing Technology: Many companies today use Mailchimp or Hubspot for their email marketing campaigns but for the more efficient marketer, they may choose to use the email marketing capability in their CRM systems.
• CRM: Nimble is our preferred CRM system, but we have used ACT! and Salesforce previously with great success. If you are a bigger company with greater marketing infrastructure, stick with SAP and Oracle solutions as they are more sophisticated solutions.
• Google Analytics: Set up Google Analytics for your website.
• Alexa: Set up Alexa including the comparisons feature.
• Marketing Automation: Many smaller businesses use Hubspot, but the Adobe solution, Marketo is far superior and certainly my choice of marketing automation and for different reasons, Eloqua by Oracle.
• Lead Generation: Using Salesloft as a tool is a gamechanger for marketing departments that are serious about providing leads to sales teams.
• SEO: For SEO, SEMrush is tool that is second to none.
• Presentations: The best presentation technology on the planet is AirDeck!
• Project Management: We use ASANA and have tried many others, but for our business, this works well.

The list of technologies that really help marketers succeed in their roles is of course, much greater than this, but from a base foundation perspective, you really can't go past these solutions.

If you have given your marketing team or marketing professional all the right tools, a budget and a key set of expectations, the rest is on them.

As marketers, we are required to:

• Develop marketing strategies aligned to business and sales goals.
• Communicate on a regular basis with management the status of sales and marketing goals, tactics and any challenges that may arise.
• Pre-empt managements need for status, data and various forms of analytics.
• Communicate wins clearly to all stakeholders.
• Manage the marketing cadence for the company.
• Understand psychology of our audience and that includes internal audiences. If your manager is wearing many hats, the last thing they want to do is be continually asking for updates, and follow-through. Ensure that you have a set system to deliver updates on a weekly basis and have set expectations that are realistic to both parties.
• Be organised. It is impossible to do marketing if you are not multi-skilled and capable of multi-tasking. Use platforms like ASANA to stay on top of projects and deliver reporting on your calendar of marketing activations.

One of the biggest issues that management is faced with is not knowing if sales and marketing is working well in their organisation. It is important to change this, by being a great communicator internally and externally, owning the marketing role and continually delivering results.