by Zoe Fisher 
Ask a room full of senior directors what Marketing does, and you will get a different answer from each person. Marketing is an evolving, multi-faceted function that actually deserves a lot more respect than it receives. Here’s how you can build a Marketing Super-team to achieve your business goals and command respect in the boardroom.
It’s all in the Matrix
The first step in assembling your super-team is to analyse the skills and traits you already have. Putting a skills matrix together is a valuable tool to look into your team as a whole and individually. This overview will identify skills gaps so you can develop your team or hire in the missing competencies. There are loads of free templates online for you to use to quickly put one together.
Are you S.M.A.R.T?
Once you’ve got your skills matrix together, match this up with your S.M.A.R.T objectives and build your plan of action. If you have a big, long-term business objective and you’re lacking some of the skills to deliver, make sure you look at whether you can train and develop your current team, or if you need to hire in some new skills.
Get together
Never underestimate the value of a full-day workshop with your team. A few examples of this include:
- creating a content strategy
- reviewing and improving a new process
- teaching new skills
- sharing lessons learned
- campaign planning
Getting your team together gives everyone a chance for their voice to be heard, bring out fresh ideas and to help build confidence. Couple this with a fun out-of-office activity for an engaged and motivated super-team.
Automation creation
How to be more efficient with the tech that your team use daily should be the biggest outcome of your team workshop. Ensuring your team has the tools to be the best they can be is critical to success. Every B2B company should adopt marketing automation to save time and deliver personalised content to customers, increasing the quality of marketing qualified leads. If the state of your automation tool is looking messy, try doing an audit or putting your team through some training to learn best practices and shortcuts.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Unfortunately, it is often that a business will look to marketing when targets aren’t being reached across the business. Ensuring marketing provides good quality leads will create a shift in your business. Moreover, blame culture between sales and marketing can result in an unpleasant working environment. A Sales and Marketing Alignment workshop can help bring your teams together and is the first step in creating a synergy between teams. When the growth function of the business is thriving, your team members will too.
Make the most of your ongoing meetings
Finally, to keep your super-team on top of their game, assess the productivity of your meetings. Often, if you have a big team, it’s easy for your weekly meetings to become a bit of a drag – filled with complaints and how to achieve the short-term goals only. Create an agenda and stick to it, here at Nebula we have short, productive meetings that always stay on topic. Each person discusses their weekly achievements and challenges, followed by any other business. Work this into your one-to-one meetings too, asking individuals to contribute to the agenda of their one-to-ones to ensure you cover everything together. Ensuring individuals feel heard and productive will keep them engaged as key members of your super-team.