Who Cares How the Marketing Department is Organized?

Attention-grabbing design

A clear and compelling message

Strong lead generation

These are the things that small (and large) companies typically ask of a marketing department.  You may have high quality web development, design, and strategy resources in place.  But should you care how the marketing department is managed day to day?  Yes - this is actually the key to being agile and making maximum impact.  Here are five “big company” work practices that are easy to implement in a small company and make a huge difference:

Theme calendar.  It’s hard to get your message heard, no matter what size you are.  If you have a website, some combination of direct mail and social outreach, and attend trade shows; don’t let each tactic send a different message to a different customer segment.  Set monthly or quarterly themes and bring all your tactics into alignment with one message at a time. This will amplify it and increase the chance of being heard.

Copy deck.  You labor to create a clear and compelling message.  If different resources are then used to generate different content for different media, the message gets out of alignment quickly.  For each theme, first write a single document that contains unified copy and images you can pull from to create your various content.

Trade show practices.  This is often the biggest lead generator for small businesses.  Go through the attendee list ahead of time, identify your targets, and plan out each individual meeting. What questions will you ask? What is your key message and ideal next step?

Lead follow-up.  Somebody in sales or marketing should be following up on leads within a couple days, and this must be tracked.  It is unacceptable for a potential customer to take the time to interact with your company and not receive immediate attention.  You’ve already made 90% of the investment to connect with them.  Pick up the phone.

Master presentation/proposal with key.  Even a short corporate presentation can be long enough to put a customer to sleep.  I managed 5 sales teams and realized that we were all constantly tailoring proposals and presentations to fit different customer situations. I would start with our generic 10-slide introduction, then hack together three additional slides relevant to my deal.  Some personalization is great, but this was time-consuming and not very professional. So we started collecting the whole sales team's proposals and presentations into single master documents every quarter, cleaned up the design, and made sure each selling point was clear and well-supported.  Within a couple quarters, we had the important points all covered. When a seller was preparing a new presentation, they could pull up the latest 40-slide "master" deck, and just delete what didn’t apply.  The customer saw a concise, professional presentation targeted directly to their need.  We even created a key that mapped customer pain points to the right slides. 

None of this adds significant work or cost. These simple practices will generate greater results from the work that marketing is already doing.

Cristiansen Group LLC is a consultancy helping small-to-medium sized businesses redesign their sales and marketing strategy to meet current challenges.  Schedule a time at www.csengroup.com to discuss your business or email us directly at cris@csengroup.com