New Year's Resolutions for Marketers - Part II

Jerry Rackley

Editors note: this is the second post in a series we have invited some of our partners and members to contribute.

Karen See (Twitter: karenlsee), revenue growth zealot and co-founder of Abovo Partners, suggests these resolutions:

Don't drown your market!

Just because you've got a contact into your database doesn't mean your market wants to hear from you EVERY DAY! With so much coming in, I now find myself just hitting "delete" versus dealing with the volume of unread e-mails and blogs.

Today I received a notice from a social media company saying they noticed I wasn't opening their messages very often, so they were changing my settings for me from daily to weekly. I really appreciated that ... and am now more likely to re-engage.

Know why you win and why you don't.

This step in the sales process is so often disregarded as the next fire rages. But without this insight (often best gathered by "outsiders/consultants" for non-biased listening), the knee jerk reaction is to just throw more stuff against the wall and hope something sticks.

The cost for trying to get an opportunity closed is usually the same (or close) ... whether you come in 1st, 2nd or 3rd. The difference is #1 recoups the investment while #2 and #3 not only don't recoup the cost, they don't make anticipated revenues. That's a double-whammy that usually is resolved by doing deep-dive due diligence on past performance.

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Jeff Pedowitz, president and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, a revenue marketing agency, shares this one:

All marketers should resolve to be accountable for revenue and tie part of their compensation to marketing's contribution to revenue.

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Lauren Carlson, analyst for MA Software Advice, wraps this post up with these resolution recommendations:

Revenue Performance Management

RPM isn't the next big acronym, but it's a pretty big deal. Eloqua and Marketo have been championing the idea of "Revenue Performance Management" as the next great frontier in marketing. RPM is all about harnessing data and analytics, and using it to prove marketing's impact on the bottom line. I think you can call it whatever you want, but the point is that marketing needs to take a more active role in proving their impact on revenue, and that means using the tools available to help do that.

Figure social media out

I spoke with Brian Solis, social media guru, and he said that currently, most companies are using social media as yet another bullhorn from which to blast their message. I think marketers and professionals in general need to figure out the most effective way to use social media to benefit their company. There are thought leadership pieces being put out every day on this topic. So, in 2012, marketers need to take an active interest in social media and actually figure out how to use it in order to reap the greatest benefits.

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These gems of wisdom are humbling and inspiring at the same time and confirm that the Demand Metric community is a repository of marketing genius. You’re in this genius pool (pardon the pun) too.  Share your insight for 2012 with us.

 

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