When you see a new internist, or go to a health club, they check your vital signs, run a few tests, and ask a lot of questions about your behavior, forebears, bad habits, self-discipline, and knowledge. The human body is such a complex mechanism, with countless components, functions, and processes, that to do a complete workup of the entire body is a huge task.

Is There a Marketer in the House?

Marketing, including sales, is also very complex and incorporates many functions, even in small companies. We are developing a new product at iWrite Marketing, called the Marketing Fitness Test. An experienced and expert physician, like the recently famous House M.D., can ask a few apparently unrelated questions and zero in on what ails the dying patient. We believe that a few well-placed questions about the behaviors and habits of your marketing team and leader can pinpoint areas for improving effectiveness.

Marketing and Sales—One Heart and One Mind

I talked in a recent newsletter about the Commonsense Marketing Framework, a way of simplifying the marketing process down to three big steps—Articulate, Decide, Communicate. If we look at marketing and sales together—and they should always be together, one heart and one mind—there are more things going on than the simple framework admits, and we need to include them in the checkup too.

Let’s add them on here, and see if they make sense to you:

1. Lead—like herding cats, but strong leadership and sound management wins.
2. Understand—know your customers, markets, competitors, and products intimately.
3. Articulate—develop great products and tell their story simply, clearly, and cogently.
4. Decide—on what products you sell, to whom, and the steps to make it happen.
5. Communicate—relate to customers, tell them your story, and convince them to buy.
6. Deliver—direct or through channels, with service, support, information, and follow-up.

You Won’t Die of Boredom

You can probably think of other things that marketing/sales does, but our research says that these six steps have got it covered. Look, the Marketing Fitness Test is going to have a lot of questions, but they will be interesting and stimulating in themselves, so that test takers learn from them directly, and don’t, as when answering the same questions for the third specialist in a week, die of boredom rather than disease.

Questioning Your Leadership

Here are two questions from the first section of the Marketing Fitness Test, with comments, to give you some ideas for better marketing leadership.

Is your marketing organization small and flat, or big and fat?

Small, flat, and overstretched moves fast, and goes for 80% good not 100% perfect. Keeping an aggressive, entrepreneurial marketing mindset is easy in a startup, but hard as the organization grows.

• Employees move from committed outreach to comfortable insularity, as teams become groups, then organizations, silos, and even fiefdoms.
• Managers hire people who don’t threaten them, so the average quality of the organization drops.
• Communication goes from immediate and face-to-face to formal, electronic, and slow.

Many businesses need big companies with big capital, but the great news is that marketing organizations do not need to grow in proportion to revenue. There are some economies of scale! Keep it small and simple. Read Dilbert.

Does the CEO lead marketing, making the CMO a business eunuch?

Good. One-guy (asexual term) marketing works. Ultimate decision authority gives less politicking, less intrigue, faster, cleaner, better—but the “guy” had better be very smart.

Peter Drucker has said that business has only two basic functions—marketing and innovation—because they produce results. Dr. Doug Kindred, the CEO, Chief Scientist, and unheralded chief marketer of the Gradient Lens Corporation in Rochester, New York, is exceptional, in my observation, in that he has comfortably and successfully worn both hats—marketing and R & D—for many years, as well as running the company.

In big companies, real, day-to-day marketing leadership should operate at the business unit or division level, close to one set of products, services, and customers. The principle of having a Chief Marketing Officer, usually self-described as a “steward of the brand,” and operating across all business units, is pure bull shiitake, as Guy Kawasaki would say.

But this is where an active, marketing-focused CEO can step in, allocating resources, holding feet to the fire, adjudicating differences, and setting standards.
Think Steve Jobs of Apple.

So are you feeling fit? Let’s find out.

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