There are many good B2B Marketing Communications professionals and teams, but a few individuals and teams stand-apart from the crowd as great.  While I suppose "great" is subjective, after working with and around many teams and professionals in 20 years as well as conducting Marketing Audits for companies and clients, it’s easy to spot extraordinary teams and individuals. 

The commitment that Relentless Promoters bring to their work is infectious, and the impact that they have on their company is material. 

If you area a marketing leader, it is your goal to populate your team with these individuals, provide them the resources that they need to succeed and stay out of the way.  And while it would be easy to slip into a nature versus nurture debate (are great marcom professionals born or made?), here are some suggestions for both scouting talent as well as helping develop it with the team you have in place.  I suspect that there is a bit of nature and a lot of nurture to produce a Relentless Promoter.

Help Wanted-Relentless Promoter

If only it were that easy.  The best that I can offer here is that there are some habits and attributes that I’ve observed in great promotions professionals that appear to be missing from the merely competent individuals.  Review this list, tune up  your interviewing skills, probe for examples and encourage your candidates to take you through some successes and failures.  If you see tangible evidence of these many intangible qualities, you may have a (prospective) Relentless Promoter.

Attributes and Habits of Relentless Promoters I’ve Known:

  • A strong sense of curiosity.  Promotions pros are preoccupied about understanding their target audiences.  They want to understand the concerns, interests and information gathering habits of the target audience.  They prefer primary research to secondary and they spend time talking to their targets.  They view their targets as their true customers and want to understand them well enough to deliver a respectful, valuable message.
  • A keen sense of strategy.  These individuals are true strategists, thinking about their world from all perspectives and developing programs with a completeness of thought that would make a McKinsey consultant smile.  They think in terms of integrated campaigns, not in one-off promotional transactions.
  • A unique ability to clarify a value proposition.  Great promoters are true craftsmen with language.  They write copy that relates to their target audience and importantly, provides a clear value proposition for your offerings that the targets will recognize.
  • They do not make the mistake of confusing great creative design with effective design.  Instead of worshiping at the altar of "great creative," Relentless Promoters worship at the altar of the most effective.  They test incessantly to gauge effectiveness and cool and cutting edge often get left behind in favor of mundane but effective.
  • A preoccupation with execution.   Relentless promoters do their homework, plan their strategy and thrive on execution.  Being good strategists, they understand that a key part of the process is working the plan, monitoring results and adjusting and adapting based on results and learnings.
  • A genuine desire to contribute.  Promotions pros see the direct connection between their work and the results of the organization.  Instead of being concerned about pushing their own agenda,or the agenda of their departmental silo, they stay focused on their work, fully aware that their output puts leads in the sales pipeline.
  • They are fierce competitors.  The marketplace is their battleground, and just because they sit behind a screen most of the day, don’t underestimate their  sense of competitiveness.  Their "win" is a qualified lead or a major publicity coup, and winning is a habit that they need to feed. 
  • They are tactic neutral.  Relentless Promoters want the right tactic or set of tactics for the situation.  Rather than apply a formulaic approach to promotions, they  mix and match depending  upon circumstances and based on  what they  understand about their target market.
  • They are honest with their performance numbers.  Marketing numbers can be some of the squishiest metrics in business but Relentless Promoters always strive for transparency in their results. 
  • They are innovators.  The best marketing communications professionals are great innovators that leverage advances in technology to find new ways to reach their targets.  They pursue innovations or new "twists" in old approaches in an attempt to improve results and cut costs.
  • They are truly nice people.  OK, this one might be hard to generalize to the broader population, but as I said, I’ve only worked with a handful of Relentless Promoters.  They are all great people!

The Care and Feeding of Relentless Promoters:

If you hire or if you already have a Relentless Promoter on your team, consider yourself fortunate.  Your job is to create the environment that will allow these talented individuals to develop and to grow their contribution to your business.  A lot of the guidance can be distilled down to get out of the way and say "Yes" when they need something.  Here are a few additional suggestions:

  • Pay attention and provide feedback, but don’t micromanage.  These well rounded, emotionally intelligent professionals want your perspective, so provide it carefully and respectfully.  If you are or have been a communications professional, remember that as a leader, that no longer is relevant.  Your job is to provide direction and guidance as well as feedback, but not to tell anyone how to do their job. 
  • Keep them plugged into your strategy.  Relentless Promoters are communications strategists.  They do their best work if they have context for your business, market and product strategies, so keep them involved and informed.  Over time, they develop a detailed understanding of your audience, and Relentless Promoters are particularly valuable as contributors to strategy development.  Give them a seat at the table.
  • Encourage experimentation, celebrate success and treat failures as valuable development opportunities.  One of the best Relentless Promoters that I worked around developed an expensive, extremely creative, multi-dimensional direct marketing program that had all of the earmarks of success, yet it failed.  In my opinion, that failure and the lessons that she learned provided guidance on how to succeed with future initiatives.  I am in awe of her body of work from that point forward.  She materially impacted our firm’s growth trajectory. 
  • Be careful who directly manages a Relentless Promoter.  My intent to "turbo charge" a group of tremendous marketing professionals by brining in a new gung-ho manager backfired miserably.  I almost wrecked the team and fortunately took action quickly to remedy my mistake.  My  objective to stimulate innovation was fine.  My mistake was misreading the impact of the wrong style of leader.  Fortunately, the leader that we put in place understood how to create a working environment that allowed the team members to thrive.

The Bottom Line:

Your marketing communications team can be a material contributor to your business growth or a cost center preoccupied with generating low value-add content.  In B2B organizations, the presence of a Relentless Promoter can transform this much maligned function into a critical part of your go-to-market program.   As a marketing leader, it is  your role to find support the development of individuals that live, eat and breathe to drive qualified leads and visibility.  Look for professionals that display the attributes of a Relentless Promoter and do your job by providing them with support and encouragement.  The right person and the right environment will create results that will shock and delight.