The Rodney Dangerfield Department of Your Company

Question. What is the most often overlooked and underappreciated department of your business? I’d be willing to make a wager with you that it is your marketing department.

Organizations seem unwilling to make the same concerted efforts and investments in their marketing efforts that they do in their sales teams or other areas of the business.

Both marketing and sales are part of an organization's revenue generation engine. Marketing, moreover, sets the story—the external narrative—for your entire company. I would suggest that Marketing has more of an impact on your business. Your marketing is the first voice your prospects hear. It is THE POINT where your prospects decide to consider doing business with you or not. The customer experience that marketers provide and the stories they tell create the foundation based on which your sales team sells.

Here is a brief breakdown of the challenges many B2B companies are experiencing today:

• Failure to differentiate is a positioning, messaging, and branding problem; the marketing team typically spearheads differentiation strategy.
• Poor lead quality is a direct result of your demand generation team's efforts.
• Extended time to close means that your prospects do not see the value in making your solution a priority. To fix that requires an effort between Marketing and Sales—and who supplies the stories for Sales? To close the gap, it takes strategic approach to nurturing your prospects.
• Price wars suggest that you haven't positioned your products correctly or you haven't found the right market segment.
• Poor customer retention is typically a customer experience problem; Marketing is often asked to spearhead CX.
• Misalignment between Sales and Marketing can ruin your B2B pipeline and deals.
• Inability to measure marketing effectiveness (or measure the right things) leads to layoffs, budget cuts, and chaos within the marketing team that can become a vicious cycle, driving profitability downward.

Clearly, each of these issues involves multiple factors and could be discussed at length, but hopefully it is apparent that marketing teams...

• Are the part of your business that's most visible to the market
• Directly affect a business's revenue and growth
• Are under more pressure than other teams in your business to learn new things and rapidly determine whether those things are a fit for overall strategy
• Are asked to do a lot

Does your business or one you consult with look at marketing as the Rodney Dangerfield department of your company?