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In today's competitive marketplace, marketing and sales costs are a growing portion of your cost structure. Common problems that prevent companies from obtaining the full benefits from these expenses include:

• Increased competition
• Increased resistance to "marketing" from customers
• Longer buying cycles
• Audience fragmentation that reduce effectiveness of traditional marketing vehicles
• Increased "no decision" stalls at all points of your sales pipeline

A study by the industry analyst firm Aberdeen Group found that as much as 80 percent of marketing expenditures on lead generation and sales collateral were wasted. Here are easy-to-follow steps to improve the ROI on your marketing and lead generation expenditures.

About a year ago, we surveyed 235 companies about their B2B marketing programs. We uncovered the following:

• Internal disagreement about the role of marketing
• Overly complicated marketing objectives
• Marketing objectives not clearly defined and difficult or impossible to measure results
• Little-to-no accountability for results

From this study, and a number of successful pilot projects, we developed a simple marketing methodology that addresses these issues. It is not rocket science. We apply basic project management practices to the marketing plan to solve the problem.

Get With the (Marketing) Plan!

Marketing projects fail when they are poorly defined, overly complex, lack measurement/accountability and take too long to execute. Optimise these five factors (definition, simplicity, accountability, friction and speed) and you can't help but improve results.

Five Drivers of Marketing Success

ONE - Define the Objectives

Many problems start with a poorly-defined plan. The plan should include program requirements (i.e., sales objectives) and potential limitations. These requirements are often referred to by project management experts as the project charter. After the plan is drafted, it should be reviewed and discussed by representatives from all departments that will be impacted by its execution in order to gain agreement and support. Only after you gather feedback should the plan be finalized.

TWO - Keep it Really Simple

Simplicity is related to "definition." Simple means ease of measurement and clearly crafted objectives. Only when there is agreement on the program direction from the outset, can sales and marketing achieve a happy medium between innovative marketing and realistic sales goals.

THREE - Measurement/Accountability

Most marketers can't tell which portion of their marketing budget contributes to sales. Ask these questions to bring clarity to the way your organization measures results and holds the marketing program accountable:

• How will the program be measured?
• Will you measure hard results like the number of leads generated?
• Or soft results like the ability of a program to build market presence or penetrate a specific market?
• If you are measuring soft results, try to gain consensus on how the activities will be measured.

Some marketers frame success by winning accounts from the competition, increasing purchase volume within existing accounts and by preventing competitors from poaching your accounts. 

A simple objective that frames the entire marketing project portfolio (for example, all projects should improve lead flow and/or improve conversion of leads to sales) makes it easier to measure success. If program tactics are not working (almost certainly will happen), how will the program be adapted? Is a strategy shift needed, or are different tactics needed? Link project success directly to the project owner's compensation.

FOUR - Streamline and Remove the Friction

Integrate your marketing into the sales process. Marketing and sales should be part of a seamless and integrated process.

Marketing should be designed to generate prospects ready to take the next action in the sales process. The sales process should be designed to accept those same prospects. Walk through each step in both of these processees and identify all elements that may cause a customer to slow down, stop, become distracted, or heaven forbid ... think.  At each decision point remove percieved risks, insert rewards, and make  along the defined path unnatural.

Re-engineer your internal sales engineering, administrative and contracting procedures to minimize delay and customer thinking. This is especially important if your sales are complex (if they involve "complex" products and services affecting multiple departments, longer sales cycles, multiple decision makers and/or senior management approval).

FIVE - Speed and Agility

Make decisions quickly. A decision not to proceed is better than no decision. A decision to kill the project frees you up to focus on other, more promising projects. Be ruthless. Kill non-starting projects quickly. Those you keep should start with tightly defined projects framed with expected results, start/finish dates and clear ROI goals. Product launches, for instance, should immediately offer results to evaluate and present the opportunity for midcourse corrections arising from that evaluation.  If you aren't making any midcourse corrections during a campaign, you are probably headed into an iceberg.

TO SUMMARIZE

• Define success before you execute
• At the end of the day, if it didn't alter customer behavior (generate sales), it didn't work
• Everything is a test. Test always. If you are not testing, how can you improve?
• Make it easy for your customers to buy. Want to know how they buy? Ask them.
• Adapt. Customers change. Adapt your behavior or go out of business.
• Remove friction. At each step fo the process, make it easy for internal decision-makers and your customers to say "yes."
• Re-engineer your processes to remove all needless friction (pay particular attention to handoffs & coordination between departments and functions)

It is not easy to implement these guidelines, because they require strong communication skills. These guidelines may threaten alternative internal and departmental priorities, and will also require you to continually educate other departments that may perceive your organization's marketing goals as a non-priority. But, these guidelines will help you prioritize which is more important to your organization: maintaining internal comfort zones or achieving top-line revenue growth.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Peter Wiltjer and Ben Bradley help B2B companies move their best targets through the entire new account acquisition cycle, transforming targets to customers. Ben can be reached at benbradley@bwmginc.com and Peter can be reached at petewiltjer@bwmginc.com.