How to Fix Marketing in 2010

Now that it's a new decade, it's time to wean the marketing group away from their delusions of strategic grandeur. Here's a simple, six-step program to ensure that your company's marke...ting is successful and productive in 2010:

• STEP #1: Correctly define marketing. If your company's marketers think that they're doing something "strategic", they're wasting money. Marketing is a tactical function whose sole purpose is to provide qualified sales leads. In a productive marketing group, all activities serve that goal.
• STEP #2: Make marketing subservient. In most companies, there's often a total disagreement about basic issues, like the intended market and the target customer. The only way to prevent stovepipes and infighting is to fold the marketing group into the sales group. Do it now.
• STEP #3: Define a qualified sales lead. A sales lead should identify a decision-maker inside a company that's part of your target market and provide enough information about the decision-maker, and the decision-maker's firm, for the sales rep to get a foothold into the opportunity.
• STEP #4. Systematize demand creation. Demand creation should never be an ad-hoc improvisation based on whatever product you want to sell today. Demand creation must be part of an integrated process that constantly creates leads and has a measurable effect on sales effectiveness.
• STEP #5: Make the sales group responsible. Once the sales group has agreed that a lead is qualified, they MUST be made 100 percent accountable for closing that lead. Under no circumstances should the sales team be allowed to fingerpoint at marketing.
• STEP #6: Measure conversion rates. Monitor your demand creation activities, find out which ones result in leads that close, and then tune the demand creation process in order to constantly improve the quality of the leads. Make sales and marketing jointly accountable for closing deals.