Often these are fixed with reactive, patchwork responses; switching marketing campaigns, staff changes, new procedures. But they can only be really solved by first understanding the system beneath them.
While every company is different, there are some common symptoms that we see recurring often, particularly in mid-sized Australian B2B companies. Here are some of the things to look for;
Marketing problems
- You invest in marketing channels, but you’re not sure how to measure them
- Your marketing generates a lot of activity, you get a lot of numbers and stats, but you aren’t really sure how it connects to revenue
- You have, or are looking for, a marketing all-rounder to fix all your problems
Sales problems
- Your sales team gets results, but they don’t always follow the procedures you’d like
- The sales team feels that marketing do not supply good quality leads
- Your team comes back from a trade show full of enthusiasm, but the leads go cold
- You can’t clearly say where your best customers come from or why they choose you
- Your team doesn’t have time to keep in touch with potential customers who aren’t ready to buy today
Operations problems
- You have dashboards and metrics, but they don’t really help predict or fix problems
- People find their own workarounds as they don’t trust the data or formal processes
- Internal teams disagree on key interactions, eg sales and marketing define leads in different ways
Software problems
- You’ve invested in a new CRM or other platform, but people aren’t using it the way you intended
- You know you need to improve software, or automation, or use AI – but you’re really not sure where to start
- Your software bill is going up, but you’re not seeing an improvement in outcomes
I imagine at least a couple of these sound familiar. If none of them do, then congratulations – you are a rare breed. For everybody else, these sorts of problems are very normal, and usually manageable. But reactive or ‘bandaid’ solutions will mean the problems keep recurring, or show up in other areas – and as competitors automate and roll out AI, and the market rapidly changes, there is the risk of being left behind.
In all of these examples, the best thing to do is take a step back and map out and really understand how your business operates. With that understanding, it becomes possible to redesign a better working system; something which you can see and understand, where you know what to measure and what it means.
From there, the answers on fixing marketing problems or sales problems, or how to automate, or what software to choose stop being random and become predictable and manageable.
