Why do so many marketing excellence programs fail to deliver on their goals? Marketing is one of the few levers that companies can use to drive profitability in the short-term and sustained growth in the long-term, yet too many companies approach such programs one-dimensionally - through competency enhancement, marketing accountability, or marketing process development. Joining the flotsam of well-intentioned corporate programs, they get tepid adoption by the business teams who consider most of them a distraction or “extra work.”
For a marketing excellence program to have a sustained impact on an organization, it must have various interlocking components, each designed to address different challenges in getting rapid results while delivering long-term change. These components are: Design, Implementation, Inspiration, and Measurement. This is the first in a series of posts on marketing excellence programs, we begin by focusing on Design.
Designing a Marketing Excellence Program
If your marketing team is carrying all the weight of your marketing excellence program, then it might be time to reconsider the design of your program. A properly designed marketing excellence program focuses on improving the practice of marketing across the organization— this isn’t just about putting the marketing department through a series of classes. It requires that every person involved in marketing to the customer learning their company’s way of doing marketing, building functional skills, and understanding their role in making customer promises that can be kept… and keeping the promises that are made. Designing a program that includes the following steps will enable your program to achieve excellence.
Competency Models - A solid beginning for an excellence program is in the definition of a competency model. Useful competency modeling begins with a careful assessment of the marketing skills that are poorly developed in your organization and those that are important to address the most critical needs of your business.
Marketing Framework - Based on the priority marketing skills, the next step is to build a marketing framework that becomes the common language for how marketing gets done in your organization. We present EMM Group's Go-to-Market Framework as an illustration:
Tools - Tools help marketers learn the framework and support them as they apply the processes in their day-to-day work. Tools can be:
- Content - such as training manuals, templates, examples, and checklists.
- Research and analytical tools to implement various steps in the framework.
- Technology tools to assist in marketing automation, knowledge sharing, collaboration, project management, planning/budgeting, and data management tasks.
Training - The marketing framework and tools work best in the hands of skilled users. Thus, an effective program requires not just training (classroom or online), but also other forms of skills improvement through implementation, collaboration, best practices development, go-to-experts, and other interventions. This should include four levels of training targeted to different parts of the organization: Leaders, Practitioners, Project Teams, and Non-Marketers ― with curriculum designed specifically for the roles of each particular group.
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