Why You Need a Marketing Readiness Assessment

Why should you do a Marketing Readiness Assessment? Your first job as a leader, marketer, or seller is to make sure your organization is ready for marketing, even if you are already doing it. But how do you know if your business is able to track, measure and report back on how well you perform with new leads and sales opportunities? How do you know if you'll get a real return from your marketing investment?

Investing in marketing to put more business in an inefficient or ineffective pipeline could be a recipe for disaster. Lacking the proper support systems can threaten the growth and stability of your business. The popular business adage “more companies die of indigestion than starvation” is as true now as when HP co-founder David Packard first said it more than 25 years ago.

A marketing readiness assessment will help you identify key areas that may require your attention before you start or continue existing marketing and sales activities. It reveals areas of strength but also gaps in how well your company can articulate who you are, what you do, who you do it for, how you do it and what makes you stand out.

It can provide clarity about what information your customers and prospects need in order to do business with you. Most importantly, it shows you what success looks like and how you are going to measure it to ensure everyone is accountable to the same goals.

A Marketing Readiness Assessment Can Reveal Your Weak Links

Many businesses struggle with marketing readiness, but it is especially prevalent among industrial companies. Marketing has traditionally been a lower priority for manufacturers, who on average devote about 6.4 percent of their annual revenue into marketing.

Some industrials also struggle with marketing readiness because:

• They may be spread thin at management levels and lack in-house marketing expertise.
• Executives often cite past failures and lack of internal measurements as reasons for not investing more in marketing. They don’t know how to get started.
• Manufacturers often focus on their longtime core customers, which means they may not be focused on growing their business.
• A frequently cited reason for not investing in marketing is that “everyone knows us.”

With that in mind, we have developed a Marketing Readiness Assessment tool to help industrial companies identify key areas that may require attention before they start or continue existing marketing and sales activities.

Be prepared for some tough love when you take this quiz. In our experience, more than half of the manufacturing companies that have taken the assessment failed. Your company may not be ready for a marketing initiative, either. While the initial scores may sting, the insight into your gaps will provide a roadmap for your team.

Steps Toward Measuring Your Marketing Readiness

The assessment is most effective when completed by each of a company’s key leadership and sales and marketing stakeholders. The assessment takes about 5-7 minutes and provides an immediate score and real-time insights into seven categories:

• Financial Operations
• Brand Strategy
• Marketing Strategy & Thought Leadership
• Digital Marketing Operations
• Analytics & Insights
• Business Development
• Sales Enablement

You may discover some of your key stakeholders don’t know how many active/paying customers you have or are not able to verbally articulate in two sentences what distinguishes your company from any competitor.

The assessment will reveal areas of strengths and gaps. It is the first of several steps to ready your company for a marketing initiative or campaign.

We use a proven model for achieving readiness:

1. Assess: Complete and score the Marketing Readiness Assessment.
2. Answer: Convene with key stakeholders to align on what answers you collectively do and do not know.
3. Address: Answer what gaps you can within a short period of time with access to the right data. It might require an action plan to acquire the needed information to address other gaps.
4. Announce: Once all key readiness metrics are established, with a mechanism to update them regularly, convene all key leadership, marketing, technical, and sales stakeholders to discuss and democratize these insights.

INDUSTRIAL offers a one-day workshop to show you how to track, measure and report back on how well you perform with new leads and sales opportunities. We will help you properly leverage the insights from the assessment into a format that is understandable and actionable for all key stakeholders.

Your outcomes and score may indicate several corrective actions that need to be addressed so your marketing initiatives have the highest probability of success. These corrective actions sharpen your growth strategies.

The Marketing Readiness Assessment can be a predictive tool as it reveals strengths and gaps in what you must know to make marketing a strength of your business and achieve sustainable long-term growth.