"What are the key qualities needed for marketing success?" Yes, it is quite a question, nearly as brain testing as the very question of “What is marketing anyway?”.
Some people will say that being able to use a certain social media channel is the vital skill whereas some people will say it is how well you can design a website, a graphic or write a blog!
A recent survey that was shared by Marketing Week confirmed that it is very different qualities that are going to be the most critical for marketers in the next three years (Source: The State of B2B Marketing).
Here at Performance For Sales, it came as no surprise that the top quality was customer insight with commercial focus and creativity in third place. With collaboration, critical thinking and problem-solving following closely behind. Leadership and resilience were about on par and financial literacy, risk taking and empathy being at the bottom of the list.
So, this makes for very interesting reading and sparks great thinking! Perhaps most importantly it demonstrates the power and role of marketing in any business and why we need to keep campaigning for marketing to be present in the board room at all times.
Back to the article and why it prompted us to recognise the significance of these findings. This is because it is these personal qualities all driven by confidence and clarity on what marketing really involves that translates into sales and results. Being such a connector process, marketing has incredible scope to bring people together and business vision to life.
Let’s take customer insight as it was top of the list. The power of knowledge is at the centre of marketing. This is the core and it’s how this information is transported around a business so that a whole team can see it, understand why and use it to bring improvements.
Marketing success lies so much with people being able to join the dots. Marketing is always in the firing line for instant results and can be under scrutiny in terms of what it actually does! Let’s reverse engineer this and see the process of marketing as a space to capture customer insights, exploit commercial desires and produce high levels of creativity to meet those needs.
Understanding the role and process of marketing from the start should allow time and space for collaboration and critical thinking can be so much more effective when working with a visual representation of the core process.
Marketing gives so much potential for leadership development. For those who get on board with marketing and give it time and space, you see their progression through the ranks happen so much faster.
So how do we address these skills and nurture people in teams to be able to offer these essential qualities?
Explore our community of trainers who provide up-skilling in the framework that powers performance and provides clarity: