I’m now almost 9 months into working with my personal trainer, following physical therapy. While I’m going to spend the rest of my life attaining goals, I can now see visible results.
Last week, I asked my trainer how long, on average, his clients stay with him. The answer is more complicated than an average, though. He said that either people are short term “6 weeks and I’m good to go, right?” or stay with him forever (or as close to it as they can).
Once again, not-work life imitates work life.
I have talked to many marketers who think a couple weeks (or days!) of learning about marketing automation and Revenue Marketing and they’ll be “good to go”. Others realize that new processes, team building, skill building, alignment, and change management all take time.
At The Pedowitz Group, we have many long-term clients who work with us year after year. They continue to move ahead, pursue excellence, and see more and more visible, and financial, results from their efforts. Unfortunately, I also see clients get a running start and…believe they can do the rest all on their own.
Sometimes they can. Sometimes they are truly motivated, will continue to look for best practices on their own, will have enough buy-in throughout the organization to keep going and will end up extremely successful. More often, though, their speed of progress begins to slow, and they wonder why they just are not as far ahead as they thought they’d be—and they need that personal trainer again.
As in fitness, so with Revenue Marketing: you make more progress, faster, and become stronger and more effective for it if you keep up the pace of change. The path to success is faster if you make consistent progress than if you go on and off your trend towards a more efficient and effective marketing and sales organization.
Every time I talk to a client, or someone who has really embraced the power of marketing technology, change management, and Revenue Marketing, I’m amazed at how much they have accomplished with their diligent, consistent progress. And the revenue results speak for themselves.
So rather than starting your gym membership for the new year and 6 or 8 weeks later stop, disappointed that you haven’t lost 25 lbs. and sculpted your whole body, consider a life-long, or even just a year-long, plan. And do the same for your marketing efforts—because they’ll be fit and trim and pay dividends too, as long as you keep at it.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to benchmark and measure your successes (and failures!) so that a year later, you can really see how far you have come. Now those are visible results.
Blog Written By: Emily Salus
Emily Salus is the Marketo Practice Director at The Pedowitz Group. She has over 20 years of experience in Marketing, PR and Sales. Emily is a certified Marketo technical consultant, providing Revenue Marketing services and strategy to enterprise clients and best practices and training to the SMB market.
While we like to think of Marketing Automation as nimble, I often see practitioners racing to the next thing without documenting what they already have. The next thing that happens is that someone leaves the company and the remaining employees – or the new ones who were hired to replace the departing employees – are left without any organized plan or history of what has been implemented in the Marketing Automation platform. This leaves the company, and the employees, at a distinct disadvantage.
