4 Steps to Align Your Cooks In the Marketing Kitchen

A dash here. A pinch there. Yes I am using the cooking analogy when it comes to marketing. Why? Because it fits like a glove, or an potholder in this case. Any successful marketing endeavor, be it a team or a campaign or what-have-you requires all the ingredients coming together to form a masterpiece of marketing.

Or something like that...

Recently the Oracle Marketing Cloud brought together six of the world's best marketing master chefs. We wanted to pick their brains to get a peek at their recipes for success. Anthony Schurz, the Online Marketing Manager at Box is one of those chefs.

Anthony's recipe is all about kitchen prep. "Whether you’re targeting start-ups or Fortune 500 companies, before your marketing dishes can thrive, you need to get your kitchen in order," he says. "It’s hard to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns without proper alignment—even worse, it can lead to poor allocation of precious marketing resources. "

He says one way to do this is by aligning your sales and marketing teams and offers the following four steps to align your cooks in the marketing kitchen.

1. Check your tools. Make sure your marketing systems sync with your CRM.
2. Get organized. Call your entire kitchen staff—including campaign managers, operations, and sales leadership—into bi-weekly meetings. Discuss previous initiatives, your successes, and roadblocks. Work with sales to forecast new volume.
3. Between meetings, continue the conversations and stay coordinated. Good communication is key.
4. Keep everyone in the loop with tools like a dedicated Google Group and Salesforce Chatter group.

He adds the following Master Marketing Chef Tip: Generating high-quality leads for sales is the core function of marketing. Without strong alignment with sales, you’re selling yourself short as a marketer and not realizing maximum ROI for the organization.

As for you, well it's you get cooking, literally. And the best way to get started is by downloading The Demand Gen Pro’s COOKBOOK 2. Not only will you see how Anthony's recipe turned out, you'll get five more additional recipes for success. Plus be sure to download the original Demand Gen Pro's Cookbook, released last year via the link on the last page for even MORE recipes!