A reoccurring theme in my company - and perhaps in many other companies - amongst the senior management is who gets to drive our digital marketing efforts? In a simple world, it's the marketing department. Full stop. But we don't live in a simple world (at least not at my company!).
Our marketing department doesn't have enough visibility on our priorities and we move across end-markets at an insanely fast pace, making it difficult for our marketing team to identify and target relevant audiences accordingly. Our sales department doesn't have the marketing expertise / knowledge, nor the attention span to be fully engaged in a marketing strategy. Yet they (our salespeople) have intimate understanding as to who we are trying to reach and how to reach them.
From my perspective, the answer is in the details. Sales leaders should provide input on priorities and audiences while marketing determines how to reach those audiences. In other words, sales = who and why; marketing = what, how and when. To address the fast tempo, we need to establish a cadence of when we revisit this; which should be no more than quarterly. This will align expectations across sales, marketing and other stakeholders by deferring any changes to this quarterly review and also ensuring enough time for marketing to develop their campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness.
This is a particularly relevant conversation for us at the moment as we are setting objectives for our new financial year, which starts November 1st.
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