The seven deadly sins are envy, pride, lust, gluttony, wrath, greed and sloth. The deadly sins of business-to-business marketing, as espoused by Christopher Ryan, president of Fusion Marketing Partners (fusionmarketingpartners.com), are not as disastrous as those, but they do deserve some serious consideration for the good of your business.
1st Deadly Sin: Insufficient self-knowledge. Usually, if you identify your strengths, you will be able to also identify your weaknesses, even if you have avoided looking at them previously. You also must be aware of what your competitors do well and what their weaknesses are. Sit down and spend some time candidly and honestly analyzing what it is that your competitors do that makes them successful.
2nd Deadly Sin: Perfection. If you spend your energy worrying and stressing about getting one aspect of your marketing efforts absolutely flawless, you will give up the opportunity to maintain a steady pace of work while freeing your mind for creative output.
3rd Deadly Sin: “But we’ve always done it this way!” The successful marketing expert Andy Grove believed that paranoia was a sign of a good marketer — meaning you should always be questioning what your competitors are doing and how they are using any new technology available to them. You can avoid becoming stagnant by being an active and aggressive consumer in whatever you buy for yourself or for your company. Observe! What are the competitors in that particular market doing? There’s nothing wrong with copying a good method if it isn’t patented.
4th Deadly Sin: Not paying attention to the numbers. The economy now demands heavy emphasis on factual data more than subjective theories. Your job as a B2B marketing manager is to embrace the data eagerly and gratefully so that you can use it to the best advantage of your company. You need to know how well your lead generation is working and the size of your market. With each promotion, you need to measure your products’ visibility. You need factual feedback from customers. You need to know the progression consumers take in making their buying decisions.
5th Deadly Sin: Lack of testing. You can’t just keep going along as usual without stopping to test where you are and to calculate whether you’re staying in step with your competitors or just staying on your own course. Ninety to 95 percent of your budget should be invested in marketing campaigns (control campaigns) that have been proven to have successful results; 5 to 10 percent can be spent trying new, innovative programs and experimenting with lead generation to get new customers and prospects. Try new ideas and don’t expect to get the same results as the rest of your sales and marketing strategies.
6th Deadly Sin: Stagnancy. You have to be aggressive. It’s the only way to succeed in a competitive environment. Your playing field is where prospects turn into customers as a natural metamorphosis, as long as you can present the right opportunities for them to understand your product and to interact with you. You just have to go for it first and analyze it later. You will gain experience and learn more by putting your best efforts out there than by trying to anticipate what will happen.
7th Deadly Sin: Wasting valuable resources. Your two most important resources are your time and your money. Too many marketing managers waste both in abundance. By paying attention to how you use your time, you can concentrate on the important marketing activities and eliminate the wasteful time-guzzlers.
