Is Your Marketing Team Ready for 2024? Take This Quiz and Find Out

It’s going to be one of the most challenging years on record for marketing folks. How do I know that? Every year has been more challenging than the previous year, and this one won’t be any different.

What’s going on that is making it so challenging? That’s probably a blog article for another day, but the short story is everything is getting more complex, everything requires more thought, strategy is as important as ever and technology is hurting as much as it’s helping.

To know if your marketing team is up to the challenges facing marketing and company leaders in general, take this short quiz. If you can’t answer yes to all seven of the items here, you’re not ready.

YES or NO – You have a compelling, emotional, engaging and potentially disruptive Big Story about your business. It’s used on your website to get a visitor’s attention in less than 10 seconds. It’s part of a story your sales reps tell in exactly the same way every time they talk to a prospect. When you tell prospects what you do and how you do it, they say, "WOW, I haven’t heard that from any of your competitors."

YES or NO – You know exactly how many leads you need to hit your sales goals and how many website visitors are needed to generate that number. You also know how many of those leads will convert into sales opportunities, get proposals and close. That number has to match your revenue goals. We call this the Revenue Cycle, and without it, you’re lost in the jungle without a map.

YES or NO – You’ve aligned your projected investment in marketing directly to the number of leads you need to generate to hit your goals. You’ve mapped out all the work that must be done as well as the resources, technology, tactics and media spend you need to get to your revenue goals. This is often misaligned. Underinvestment means you’ll come up short, so either restate your goals to match your budget or increase your budget to match your expected goals.

YES or NO – You have all the people you need to execute the designed and budgeted program. You have the in-house team, the external agency or the freelancers to do everything in the time you need it done and they have the expertise to do it. This means they’ve done it many times before. If this is the first time that they’ve done any of it, you’re risking underperformance. Here’s an episode of our podcast What’s Wrong With Revenue? that goes deep on the challenges associated with standing up the right team.

YES or NO – You’re executing the right set of tactics and enough tactics to hit your lead generation goals. You probably won’t be able to do everything you want, but you’ve prioritized all the available tactics to focus on the ones that will provide the biggest lift for the least amount of effort and rounded out that list with other tactics you can afford and deliver on. Most companies aren’t doing enough or they’re doing the wrong things – don’t make that mistake.

YES or NO – You’ve orchestrated all the correct tactics into an omnichannel campaign that is highly personalized. Today’s marketing is no longer one-to-many, it’s one-to-one – or at least it seems like that to the prospect. Personalized messaging, personalized content offers and personalized visuals all make it seem like you’re talking specifically to one person through a variety of channels. This is challenging but required in 2024 if you want to cut through the clutter and generate high-value leads that turn into sales opportunities.

YES or NO – You have the technology platform required to generate the leads, automate the tasks and get the analytics necessary to provide insights that drive your ongoing optimization of each campaign and all the tactics.

You can see from the quiz that there is a lot to do, and it has to be done simultaneously. No one person and no company can execute this without technology. You should be looking at a platform that includes marketing, sales, customer service, your website and any related operations. Platforms like HubSpot provide all the tools integrated out of the box. Start thinking about a more integrated platform approach to your revenue generation.

Even one no from this list above is going to limit your ability to hit your revenue goals. Together, these make up what we call a Revenue Generation System, one that when paired with highly effective sales execution drives revenue and company growth at light speed.

But so many companies are missing at least some of the components above. This is your chance to rethink lead generation, get the pieces in place, add the outside expertise you need to ensure you grow in 2024 and make this the best year ever.