Insights Blog

Most companies have some sales or marketing capability improvement project running every year. Many of these projects however fail to achieve their desired objectives. Processes are created but not used. Dashboards are published but not leveraged. Training is imparted but does not substantially change organizational behavior. Our experience and analysis of such projects reveals that there are primarily two reasons for these projects falling short of their desired goals. (a) Many of these projects do not approach the capability development from a holistic perspective and (b) the capability development model applied is generic and not sensitive to the differences between demand generation activities and other parts of the organization.

Here are five principles for developing great advertising. While they are not meant to be a comprehensive list of everything you need to do to produce great advertising, doing these elements correctly can help you to a large extent in producing tremendously successful advertising.

Driving organic growth in an organization is not as simple as implementing a strategy or rolling out a new framework. It is a complex multi-component program that usually takes many years to implement. While framework and tools are essential ingredients, the success of the program is rooted in managing the culture change in the organization and creating hunger within the organization for a new, customer-centric approach.

I visited Frost & Sullivan’s 10th Annual Sales and Marketing conference in Los Angeles earlier this week. At one of the events, a roundtable on bridging the sales and marketing divide, a fairly senior member of the audience expressed his frustration at hearing the same discussion for the past several decades. He complained that the same arguments were being made, the same imperatives were emphasized, but the silos are still standing tall. In fact, one of the questions raised by the panel moderator was whether the only way to bridge the divide is to make a drastic change like hiring a new CEO. What I found intriguing about the panel and audience discussion was the notion that sales and marketing are two separate functions that have to be somehow bridged. I believe that this is the wrong construct. As long as we refuse to think about them as one process of demand generation, we will continue to re-visit the same challenges.

Organic growth can be accelerated by tackling it as a process. By that term we mean doing the right things in the right order, applying the right resources and measuring the appropriate outputs so as to be able to drive continuous improvement.