As a Digital Marketing Consultant, I'm normally requested by a CEO or COO of a company, to work with their marketing teams, to help grow their marketing and lead generation programs, recommend strategies based on ROI or evolve current offline programs to include digital marketing programs, which is why I always begin with an evaluation of the current marketing team structure, their programs and processes.
Unfortunately, I am encountering regularly, that many of these companies that I am working with, are not performing internal evaluations on a regular basis, or at all, to measure marketing programs against KPIs, or review reports that give full transparency of leads to sales processes. In many ways, these companies are making decisions without being fully informed of their own efforts, which is costing them millions of dollars on unsuccessful programs and not focusing on the successful programs that drive a good ROI. This lack of marketing evaluation includes Fortune 100 clients to the tech growth companies, that I have worked with. This is not an industry or company size issue, it's a lack of clarity issue on what should be tracked and measured.
I always begin evaluating a marketing team structure, along with their responsibilities, processes, and reviewing their KPIs, to understand the company's business goals, as well as, analyzing all reports that the teams review on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis to make sure, that they are reviewing the reports that best give them transparency into their marketing programs. If you're Head of Marketing is not evaluating their teams and processes on a quarterly basis, at the least, then get on it now, because you're throwing money out the window, and honestly, I'll take it.
If your company lacks resources to conduct a marketing evaluation quarterly, then just do one simple task, make sure that the reports that your marketing team reviews, can accurately report the leads to sales conversions.