What does it take to put together a truly effective marketing team? Not just one who keeps up with the times, but one who is always one step ahead. Even if their marketing department is already overburdened, it’s a question that every brand should consider from time to time. Why is this the case? Simply put, the marketing landscape is shifting, and brands must adapt. To prepare for these changes, brands will need to place a greater emphasis than ever on the quality of their marketing team hires.
To be successful in marketing, you must hire people who have a combination of experience, creativity, and a willingness to try new things, as well as a talent for working well with others. Here, you’ll learn everything you need to know about leading a team to success. How to Lead a Profitable Marketing Team:
1. Recognize your flaws and set achievable goals:
- Making wise hiring decisions necessitates first understanding the gaps in your current sales and marketing teams. Your objectives will help you decide who to hire and where to hire.
- Conduct a funnel gap analysis to determine where your current sales and marketing functions are lacking. If you’re having trouble capturing leads at the top of the funnel, you may need to hire more marketers to expand the reach and effectiveness of your messaging.
- If you’re having trouble closing deals, you might need to focus on building your sales team instead.
- Regardless, the various roles you’re hiring for will have a different impact on your funnel, so you must account for this before you begin the hiring process.
- Make certain that your technology and internal processes are built on a scalable, appropriate foundation to handle these changes.
2. Use technology wisely:
- Hiring a new team member to solve a manual process is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when building your sales and marketing team.
- Consider how you can use the technology you already have to automate certain processes and stretch your resources.
- Furthermore, when both your sales and marketing teams are familiar with all of the technology available to them, you create the revenue alignment that allows both teams to function more effectively.
3. Marketing and sales alignment:
- Speaking of this, you can’t build a successful sales and marketing team unless both teams are on the same page about who your prospects are, what they care about, how to frame your messages, and which company goals you’re working toward.
- By ensuring team alignment, you can communicate more effectively about the challenges that each team is facing.
4. Assess each team’s contribution to revenue:
- Many marketing teams are judged solely on the number of leads they generate, which is a mistake.
- Setting lead quotas for your marketing team is fine, but if you’re not also measuring your marketing team’s bottom-line contribution to overall revenue, you’re not accounting for the fit or interest of those leads.
- For decades, sales and marketing teams had struggled with this problem. Because low-quality leads are unlikely to close, focusing on them is a waste of both sales and marketing resources.
- To be successful, both teams must be measured not only by the number of leads they generate but also by the percentage of those leads who become customers.
5. Consider your current team’s strengths and weaknesses:
- What do your current marketers and salespeople excel at? What are they having trouble with? Employees in sales and marketing teams naturally advance into more specialized roles as their teams grow.
- Consider the specialization gaps in your current team and hire to fill them. If your marketing team is having difficulty effectively managing your social media accounts, you should consider hiring a marketer with experience in social media marketing.
- But, once again, make certain that you’re not hiring to solve a manual process or a problem that could be solved with the technology you already have.
Conclusion:
Creating a successful sales and marketing team necessitates visibility, alignment, and filling the team’s gaps and weaknesses. Finally, you may decide to take a step back and evaluate the performance and capabilities of your current sales and marketing team, and you may realize that hiring an outside agency is a better option for your company. Your decision will be based entirely on your strengths, domain knowledge, and resources. Whatever “success” means for your company, these five steps should help you build a scalable, successful sales and marketing team.