Welcome to the Market Muse

In the course of my work I consult with and advise sales execs, CEOs, CFOs and marketing execs about the marketing function. I like to start an engagement by interviewing everyone even when my primary focus is the marketing leader and their team.  

I consider it a good day when minimally TWO of these stakeholders have similar expectations for the marketing function. To some degree everyone can agree that generating more revenue faster would be a great outcome for the marketing investment. Generally speaking, everyone can agree that marketing is important - even when they disagree on how much should be spent on marketing.

Unfortunately, whenever there is a short fall in number of deals, revenue or sales productivity the first place everyone looks is marketing. Any one of these factors is a compelling event for engaging someone like me. 

Conversely, when the company exceeds their revenue number, the outcome is attributed to sales and/or product.

Other compelling events for engaging someone like me:  filling in for a departed marketing leader, CEO willing to admit they don't know much about marketing, new infusion of cash that could fund 'more' marketing, acquisition of another company, overwhelming competitive pressure.

In this blog, I hope to share some real life examples of how companies approach these events and manage the outcomes, with the names changed to protect the innocent. While these situations are dynamic, I'll share the results they have been able to achieve as they make changes to spend, organization and strategy.

If you haven't already done this - snapshot your baseline. You'll never know if what you are doing is working if you don't have a point of comparison. Document length of your sales cycle, steps of the sale for your wins, steps of the sale for your losses, win/loss ratio and size of your marketing database.

Does Sales Enablement belong in sales, marketing or operations?