Developing a Marketing Mindset

A marketing mindset is one that recognizes that marketing is more than just a narrow set of responsibilities assigned to one person, and it’s more than just advertising. A marketing mindset considers the impact of marketing on every area of your company and asks: how do all of the various business functions, sales, service and installation, customer service, billing, operations, even IT and management, help convey the value of our goods and services to potential customers?

Even more fundamentally, a marketing mindset recognizes that marketing is not simply a cost or support function, but rather a primary, revenue-generating function that drives the growth and strategic path of your company. In fact, well-known management guru, Peter F. Drucker, once said, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”

To adopt a marketing mindset, you must commit to supporting marketing as an integral function to your business, and promote a business approach and a culture that makes marketing an important, accountable, and measurable function.

A company-wide marketing mindset is even more beneficial. When you share your marketing plan with your whole team, you’ll get everyone thinking about how they might do their part to support the plan. Perhaps one of them will have a creative idea you might never have thought to try. Perhaps they will be willing to share and make comments on your social media pages. Maybe one of your operational people will write a blog about a solution and why it’s superior. Or you may ask someone to ensure all your potential customer email addresses are properly maintained in a “clean” database.

Adopting a company-wide marketing mindset also fosters collaboration across marketing and sales. While the marketing function is focused on generating leads and awareness, it’s the salesperson’s job to turn the lead into a customer.

Marketing involves creating and uncovering customer wants and needs, identifying new opportunities for growth, and conveying your value proposition (why you’re different) to your customers and prospects. When marketing and sales are aligned, the outcome is a more customer-focused company. When the marketing and sales functions work closely together and share competitor information, lead qualification and lead feedback occurs, which ultimately means more closed sales and satisfied customers.

In the same way, marketing’s close interaction with customer service, service and installation, and other operational functions like billing and collections, results in better information gathering about customers wants and needs, as well as market trends and challenges. These departments are also on the front lines of the customer experience, and each interaction with a customer or prospect is another chance to communicate your company’s marketing message and to positively impact customer loyalty, retention, referrals, and even greater lead generation.