6 Steps to Taking Your Marketing Team to Ultimate Creativity…
Los Angeles Internet Marketing •
July 2nd, 2007
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This week I was asked to present a marketing plan… Hehehe… I don’t think my boss was ready for this!
Some of the challenges we have been facing (my boss hasn’t realized) is that there is a large disconnect between our sales department and our marketing department… as well as our IT department… (creates alot of politics - god). My boss asked me to create a marketing plan for the team - and this is what I came up with.
The six steps to having a creative marketing team!
1. Involve the team in everything. Not all specifics, but some. Team brainwork is much better- even if it takes longer.
2. Involve the team with the sales managers. We are now having a weekly meeting with them. Let’s show them that we are all listening, and actually listen. Also, instead of having to hear from the CEO that our sales quality is going down or up, let’s hear it from the sale managers first. This way, our own antennas will be on the ball.
3. Focus on experimentation. I feel that everyone on the team has more to share than they have in the past. We all have great ideas - heck especially the receptionists.
4. Encourage Creativity / Personal Responsibility / Team Responsibility.
a. Creativity - Let’s encourage all ideas, no matter how stupid we think it is.
b. Personal Responsibility - The person who thinks of the idea should be in charge of implementation, coordination among other team members, as well as reporting on their’ feel about it’s success. This should be as impartial as possible given the team members obvious subjectiveness. To support this, no idea should be derided - if ultimately it isn’t followed up on. Ben Mack, in his book “Think Two Products Ahead”, an Amazon bestseller, sais the one thing Direct marketers could learn from the  Advertising world is “how to be creative.” (We’ll leave that for a different discussion)
c. Team Responsibility - We need to be as the CEO said, “Family Marketing”. Let’s all band together, and that means taking an interest in everyone elses projects. We need to have everyone involved to whatever extent that they understand the project. Offering opinions, saying honestly when they feel the project is a success or failure. This may lead to some heated debate. However, as long as we can focus on the goal - the bottom line, we can remain as objective as possible.
5. Create weekly reports on the ideas we are trying, and the results, whether good or bad. Preferably, they should be in a way that the CEO would appreciate - and would keep interest in. We would show these reports to the CEO, and let him put in his input - positive or negative.
6. Use those same weekly reports as the basis for our weekly meetings with the sales managers. We will want to ask them how their week has been, as well as presenting what we have been trying to do for them that week.
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