Tight marketing budgets, more data and technology at our fingertips and the need for instant gratification—today, speed, agility and action win the game.
Why?
Your customers expect real-time engagement, and you can’t afford to leave room for competitors to get ahead. Simply put, companies today can’t afford not to be scrappy.
These are the six behavioral characteristics you should expect to build a high-performance marketing team—including your vendors:
- They get down to work, quickly. Meetings don’t happen a week from now, they happened yesterday. And even when unavoidable delays occur outside of marketing’s control, your team is resilient, stays positive and is impatient for action—they immediately get creative and evaluate what can be done to keep things moving or shift fast in a different direction.
- They don’t get overly bogged down by the need for information. Don’t get me wrong: Insights about your business problem, customer motivations and the market are key to developing a sound marketing strategy—but it must be reasonably balanced with propensity for action. High-performance marketing teams make the most of insights you already have available while taking a smart and efficient approach to researching and talking directly to customers to close the gaps.
- They take a lean approach. They approach your program as if you were a startup with limited resources—both time and money. There’s very little waste factor. They only bring the most essential people to meetings. And they aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves, do the hard work and get a little dirty along the way.
- Their drive for results is restless and personal. They own your problem as if their career depends on it, and they don’t stop thinking about it, looking for creative solutions and analyzing real-time market developments for opportunities for your brand to gain a competitive edge. The hunger is palpable and magnetic.
- They don’t sweat over perfection. When perfection is the focus, you’ll always be planning and your campaign will never launch. That’s the opposite of scrappy. Your team shouldn’t be afraid to take some calculated risks, get the work out there and learn from it to refine future strategies.
- There are no excuses for inaction. They bust right through hurdles with agility and they don’t let other projects prevent forward progress. In fact, you can’t even tell the team is working on anything other than your top priorities.
The most successful marketing teams I’ve worked on in my career have these attributes in common. They are comprised of fighters who just get things done.
What’s your take? Do you find this to be true in your work, as well? Share your comments on LinkedIn, tagging @Inprela.
