Modern-day competition in a quick information-backed regime is only forcing sales and marketing managers to transfer accountability down the line. While job descriptions suggest ‘management’, managers are literally left to ‘manage’ situations rather than improve them. CMOs diligently watching their trends must go beyond the definition of management to understand that performance improvement requires coaching and not just an adjustment. It is only when the CMO fully comprehends the complete picture, can he/she transfer relevant knowledge and practice, to the sales managers for implementation. At the same time, leaders cannot run track the entire way with the weight on their shoulders alone. They must drop the pretensions of invincibility and get some help to wade through the situation.

What they really need is a mentor, coach, or at least someone who can neutrally reveal the truth about their marketing behaviour and provide suggestions that they might not get even from their employees or board members. A business leader should be able to assess the need for a marketing mentor and make a collaborative decision, along with the team, at the right time.

A collective effort

Successful CEOs and CMOs cannot be independent visionaries. They have to create value through inspiration and infuse a collective will to achieve. The CMO’s job doesn’t end with sending messages to their managers after reviewing a sales report. It has to be followed by coaching to sell better and more. Advanced marketing-oriented organisations are always looking for specific activities or ineffective loopholes within their implementation that might have led to missed objectives. But most of them are inept at solving the issue because they are unable to identify the problem in the first place!

The effectiveness of your sales management team can be assessed by the quality and quantity of coaching. While the quality of coaching is difficult to measure, you can always evaluate whether your managers are spending 60% of their time in observation and coaching. If they are not hitting the mark on the metrics, then it is time to get a marketing mentor.

Introducing the marketing mentor

A marketing coach or mentor addresses the principal problem – more leads, more sales. As a business leader, you are always looking to scale through profits from fresh customers. But can a marketing team focus when the leaders and managers themselves are scrambling to keep up?

To steer your ongoing marketing venture towards the right direction, you must hire a marketing mentor. The strategy is also one of the best growth hacks you can adopt. Especially in times of recession and market volatility, it is imperative to reach out to a mentor who can provide you with a neutral, fresh, 360-degree perspective of your current pursuits versus what they actually should be.  Here are a few major reasons why large organisations should hire a marketing coach:

• Get an objective and professional review of your current marketing approach
• Guide the organisation and its leader towards the best marketing practices
• Orchestrate digital, inbound and social marketing towards an improved direction
• Present new, enabled and achievable strategies to leadership

Just like a successful athlete or an artist needs mentors and coaches to develop them, so do enterprises need marketing mentors to guide them through their marketing journey. Mind you, it is not the mentor’s role to teach you about the channels that you have to use or the SEO methodologies that you have to adapt. Instead, the marketing coach helps the mentee figure out what they need to learn and discard. Mentors make sure that business leaders do not get caught up in the smaller day-to-day activities and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Here is an elaboration as to why you need a marketing mentor.

Make a big impact on your business

Every time you try to do something new in marketing, you are spending valuable company time thinking, drafting, and implementing. And how long would it be before you even get started on seeing the results? Leaders must spend time running the business rather than think of ways to showcase it. When you work with a marketing coach, you quickly understand what works for your business and what doesn’t. Learn about all the new tools and tactics in a fraction of the time, you would have otherwise spent on self-research. You can instantly fit it all into the business and spend time doing rather than learning.

Non-progressive marketing

With your current marketing strategy, you either don’t have enough qualified leads, or are generating leads but are not able to close them. A good marketing coach identifies all the ambiguities in the existing marketing system to create solutions to enhance marketing efforts. The right marketing mentor will try to fully evaluate what is not working before trying to fix the issue. If your product or service is outdated or overpriced, then the mentor is honest and tells you about this upfront.

Fresh perspective

In an attempt to continuously improve, great companies constantly assess themselves through honest feedback. Before you up your marketing game, you have to be made aware of your weaknesses. Experienced marketing coaches provide you with a neutral outsider perspective to help you identify which areas of your business need the most improvement. They help create effective marketing campaigns, better target your customers and identify who your real buyers are. The marketing consultant brings an outsider perspective to identify communication breakdowns within sales and customer service teams.

Specialised marketing skills

Your company’s marketing department may be doing well in certain areas while lacking in others. While you might have identified a weakness that needs to be improved, you don’t have the resources or time internally to tackle it. This is when it makes the most sense to bring in an expert in the discipline. A marketing coach specialises in a number of services and therefore can bring industry-specific experience to the table. Turn your weaknesses into your strengths when you hire a marketing consultant specialist.

Fixing the CMO mindset

In today’s environment, marketing challenges have only grown starker. Businesses are continuously reinventing their product, channel, and demand strategies amidst quarantines, shutdowns, and changing consumer needs. Parallelly, resilient plans have to be crafted to deliver business growth. CMOs must reboot their role to become key leaders in digital transformation in a post-pandemic world. They must be capacity builders and focus on futuristic innovation and growth.