Assembling the team

Marketing takes teamwork, and it’s up to you to create and manage a cross-functional team to help you succeed. Here’s what you need. First is finance. Your finance department allocates budget dollars to execute your plan. Finance will also help you measure results. They’ll help you quantify your ROMI, return on marketing investments, and help find ways to improve it in the next business cycle. Marketing research is another key role. Marketing research can be applied to any step of the marketing process, so be sure to get their advice on the best way to use it. Next is your technical team. They might be engineers or scientists in an R&D department or perhaps software developers. It depends on the nature of your business. They create the products and services to delight your customers. Now, along with your technical team, you should involve your design team. They make sure your products and services are delivering the right experience for your customers to build and enhance the brand promise. You must involve your sales team. Hey, they’re on the front line day to day, and they have lots of insights about your customers and your competition. They’ll have great ideas about the selling tools they need to succeed. Now, depending on your business, you may also want to involve colleagues from manufacturing or operations. These are the people who make the products or deliver a service. And finally, you may have external partners, like an advertising agency, a branding company, a public relations firm, or perhaps a marketing consultant. Now, once you’ve created the team, make sure they’re aware of your planning schedule, and that they know their role, and they know the expectations that you have for each of them in developing a great marketing strategy.