Now that I've talked about how to connect the strategic with the tactical when it comes to marketing programs management, it's important to mention the need to remember marketing's charter within any successful company: drive demand and generate leads for the sales force. If you're spending too much time at the strategic level and not executing good marketing programs that generate a steady flow of leads for sales, you're wasting your time. "Keep your head in the sky, and your feet on the ground."
I see marketing managers that spend way too much of their time working on strategy and who are not able to execute the kinds of lead generation programs that feed the Sales team. This is where Marketing gets a bad rap: sales teams who are under-fed when it comes to leads feel like the marketing department is not pulling its weight.
If your company is thinking about how to improve the effectiveness of its marketing programs, make sure that you start evaluating your marketing effectiveness in terms of the quantity and quality of sales leads, and the return on investment that's coming from those activities.
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