Thought it might be interesting to see what comes up when you run a search for Marketing Coaching currently - it's fairly interesting to see the wide variety of responses you get - try it and see :-)
What it does suggest is that no one out there has any real understanding around the coaching experience in relation to Marketing and the benefits which can be gained from having some structure around a marketing department.
There's a lot of education to be done in this space....
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3 comments:
Coaching marketing skills adds so much value and skill into a business when the business understands what marketing can deliver from a commercial perspective.
The concept of transferring skills at two levels, into board and marketing department, is unique.
In fact, getting business owners to understand that marketing is more than a brochure is a huge step forward and getting marketing professionals to have the confidence to challenge the board’s pre conceptions is bold.
Business coaching is a fairly new concept in the UK – it will be interesting to see how the marketing sector adopts it!
It's amazing how often we see businesses leap straight into implementation - weighty media schedules, complex CRM systems etc with all the anxiety of cost and the feeling of a 'leap of faith' that needs to be taken before any results may be known.
But if you think about it for a moment - if your agency/supplier makes their money from the implementation - guess what? They will want to start implementation straight away, right or wrong.
The joy of a structured coaching approach is the coach isn't funded through the implementation, and therefore has no vested interests. A coach will often suggest stopping activity until you are clear what are the real business drivers behind your decisions.
Get those business issues clear at a strategic level first - and you'll be surprised how much more manageable and measurable your marketing activity will become
A recent piece in the Sunday Times started as follows: “I was once summoned for a job interview at The Economist magazine. “We need a specialist,” said the rather professorial section editor, “and we think you might be the man. It’s to write about this thing we can’t quite get our heads round. It’s called marketing . . .” Given the huge commercial success of The Economist’s own marketing department, it’s a great example of how difficult it is for non-marketing management to understand what it’s about and how it can add real value if managed properly. This is a real challenge for companies where the individuals at board level who include “marketing” in their remit have no experience or knowledge of what it really means. In the past, faced with this gap in their expertise and unable or unwilling to take a marketing course, they would either leave marketing to get on with the tactical delivery of “marketing” as cheaply as possible, or seek inspiration from suppliers only too ready to teach them in return for selling them specific – and often expensive – projects. And meanwhile the underlying structural issues went unresolved. Coaching offers a real alternative: by transferring marketing skills into a business, it leaves it better equipped to get the marketing structure right and make it a strategic function rather than a tactical activity – with none of the costs in time, money and effort of the alternatives.
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