Marketing shares a vision that is fully aligned with the CEO and VP Sales in terms of the role of marketing, goals & expectations, issues, plans, budgets and other resources required to achieve revenue targets.

The Marketing organization is viewed as a highly respected and strategic function with responsibility and accountability for contributing to the revenue pipeline.

Senior staff regularly conduct interviews and/or surveys with our ideal customers to identify their buying process, determine which content they need to make purchase decisions, validate our value proposition, and identify ideas for new products and services.

We document and maintain profiles for the types of customers and organizations that are highly profitable and provide us with a strong CLV (customer lifetime value), and we share them with Sales.

We have created fictional buyer personas for each role in the customer buying process (technical, end user, decision-maker, etc.) that include rich profile information including job responsibilities, key industry issues, challenges, education level, demographics, psychographics, media preferences and other relevant information.

We understand the key stages in our customer’s buying journey, have mapped our current content into each of these stages, and have a plan to resolve any gaps in our content portfolio.

The messaging on our website and content is organized around industry ‘solutions’ vs. having generic product/service/company information.

We have a formal process for logically analyzing and prioritizing marketing programs and department development opportunities to optimize our resource allocation decisions.

We have a formal strategy, processes and systems for selecting, targeting, and generating sales opportunities from a list of key accounts based on their propensity to become a long-term profitable customer and/or their current intent to purchase a solution like ours.