Is your marketing not delivering the growth for your Scale-Up that it should? Companies spend an average of 9.5% of annual sales on marketing. Yet you feel you’re missing out on sales. That you’re not getting the maximum growth out of your Scale-Up. You lack knowledge and clout in marketing. If you are looking for […] The post Business-Driven Marketing (BDM): 8 Steps to Drive Business Impact [+14 Templates] appeared first on Gust de Backer.
Is your marketing not delivering the growth for your Scale-Up that it should?
Companies spend an average of 9.5% of annual sales on marketing.
Yet you feel you’re missing out on sales.
That you’re not getting the maximum growth out of your Scale-Up.
You lack knowledge and clout in marketing.
If you are looking for a reliable Marketing Management Methodology to:
- Grow your Scale-Up every day in the smartest way possible.
- Cost-effectively capture more market share.
- Acquire new customers more easily.
Then start Business-Driven Marketing today in 8 steps.
(Read on.)
What is Business-Driven Marketing?
As a marketing consultant for the past several years, I’ve had an inside look…
…within small and large companies in both business and consumer markets:
- Managed millions of dollars in marketing budgets.
- Conducted hundreds of experiments.
- Contributed to more than one hundred million euros in sales.
- Won 4 (inter)national professional awards.
Over time, patterns begin to form in which ‘Growth Companies’ differentiate themselves from ‘Decrease Companies’.
These patterns can also be found in countless books, articles and existing models.
Ultimately, these patterns trace back to the ‘Marketing Management Methodology’ that successful ‘Growth Companies’ follow.
In other words, a marketing department’s approach to achieving business objectives.
“Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) is a marketing management methodology for growing your Scale-Up every day in the smartest way possible by responding to changes in market dynamics and customer behavior from 8 essential business elements.”
The philosophy behind Business-Driven Marketing sees marketing not as a cost, but as the heart of your Scale-Up.
Business-Driven Marketing thus acts as the bridge between your business and the market:
The goal? Taking your Scale-Up to the next stage:
(Read on.)
Why Business-Driven Marketing?
In 1990, FC Barcelona had won the national championship only twice in the past 29 years.
Money, egos and politics threatened the unique Catalan soccer philosophy.
The appointment of Johan Cruijff as coach changed everything.
He implemented ‘Total Football’ a revolutionary style of play in which players constantly switched positions.
This clever positional play ushered in a golden era for FC Barcelona.
Cruijff managed to become Spain’s national champion four times in a row and won the first Champions League title in the club’s history.
So a good process naturally leads to good results:
Create an environment where success is not only possible, but inevitable.
How does Business-Driven Marketing help you win ‘the Champions League’ in your market?
By transforming the 8 elements of Marketing Management within your Scale-Up:
| Element | From: Traditional Marketing | To: Business-Driven Marketing |
| (PE) Organization | Slow decision-making with little collaboration and low employee engagement | Great adaptability thanks to collaboration and high employee engagement. |
| (PE) Skills | Specializing in traditional expertise. | Versatile skillset aligned with business goals and market dynamics for efficient talent deployment. |
| (PR) Intelligence | Decisions based on intuition. | Systematic data processes for effective decisions with predictable results. |
| (PR) Goals | Company goals do not live within the organization. | Strategically aligned, measurable and inspiring short- and long-term goals. |
| (PR) Strategy | Focus on short-term with mostly a reactive approach. | Proactive strategy with clear strategic planning. |
| (PR) Process | Linear entrenched processes. | Iterative processes aimed at continuous improvement. |
| (PR) Experience | Stuck in ‘Business as Usual’. | Maximum customer satisfaction through optimal customer experience. |
| (PE) Stakeholders | Marketing is seen as secondary. | Marketing is primary driver of business growth through frequent and effective stakeholder engagement. |
* PE: People
* PR: Process
Want to know how you score on these 8 elements? Do the Marketing Maturity Scan for free and find out your current maturity:
Why specifically these 8 elements?
(Read on.)
8 Elements of Business-Driven Marketing
Often you are fixing symptoms while leaving the underlying cause untreated.
Like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg.
The symptoms of a failing marketing department can almost always be traced back to 8 root causes:
Your Scale-Up is hungry for more sales and business growth, but at the same time wants to be fit with a healthy bottom line.
To satisfy that hunger:
- Do you go to a restaurant, like an agency that does executive work but lacks long-term vision and in-depth knowledge of your market.
- Do you buy one recipe, like a consultant who focuses on formulating theoretical solutions to specific problems, which are the result of a failing approach.
What you need is a cookbook, or a Marketing Management Methodology to achieve business growth in a systematic way, by working on the right issues in both the short and long term and continuously responding to changes in market dynamics and customer behavior.
Do you want to improve not only your bottom line, but also your business? Then get started with a nutrition coach, or start with (hands-on) Business-Driven Marketing Consultancy.
Discover the 8 elements of Business-Driven Marketing:
- Organization: Ensure that the organization is in line with the ambitions.
- Skills: Ensure that the right skills are deployed at the right time.
- Intelligence: Ensure an ongoing stream of reliable insights.
- Goals: Ensure a clear direction.
- Strategy: Ensure a proactive approach.
- Process: Ensure an iterative work process.
- Experience: Ensure an excellent customer experience.
- Stakeholders: Ensure the right people are involved at the right time.
(Read on.)
Organization
Ensure that the organization is in line with the ambitions.
Companies with a resilient organization achieve +10 to +120% more operating profit in times of economic recession.
Structure your organization smartly to respond quickly to changes in market dynamics and customer behavior.
Every organization has 2 definitions:
- Theory: the formal, written-out form.
- Practice: how colleagues actually behave in the workplace.
Writing out the theory is easy, but actually establishing a strong organization is difficult in practice.
You can prepare a game so well, but the plan only works if the players execute it well.
The complete Business-Driven Marketing methodology (>100 pages + 14 templates) within ‘Organization’ addresses:
- Principles: the 10 Business-Driven Marketing principles that guide your team(s) to make the right decisions every day.
- Organizational Structure: discover the organizational structure that best fits your situation.
- Team Structure: maintain a team structure where you can build on both short- and long-term success.
- Team Composition: teams that can adapt quickly, deliver high-quality work and are easy to manage.
- Team Size: find the right balance between team diversity and engagement.
- Team Interaction: create a self-reliant culture by ensuring the right interactions and actions within teams.
- Team Coaching: effective task-oriented and people-oriented coaching to develop both organization and individuals.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
Skills
Ensure that the right skills are deployed at the right time.
According to my professor of Human Resource Management (HRM), the main goal of HRM is to: “Put the right people at the right place in the right time.”
That starts with having people with the right skills.
A house without a foundation collapses at the first storm.
The same goes for your team if your team members don’t have the right skills.
Is a goalkeeper as effective if you use it as an attacker?
No, the competencies of a good goalkeeper do not lend themselves to that.
The goal is to minimize your dependence on a few individuals while ensuring quality.
The complete Business-Driven Marketing methodology (>100 pages + 14 templates) goes into detail within ‘Skills’ on:
- Soft-Skills: finding people with the right traits and then bringing out these traits from your team.
- Personality Testing: improve recruitment process by assessing applicants faster and better using personality tests.
- Hard-Skills: recruit and train the right skills using the ‘Business-Driven Marketer Competences Profile’.
- Depth of Skill: the depth of expertise in a specific skill, ensuring quality.
- Width of Skill: the diversity in terms of quantity of skills, ensuring adaptability.
- On-Boarding: a good on-boarding process increases retention of new colleagues by +82% and increases productivity by +70%.
- Career Paths: 55% of companies do not have clear career paths, a common reason for unnecessary employee turnover.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
Intelligence
Provide an ongoing stream of reliable insights.
Often you are already surrounded by data, but not insights.
Without insights, you sail like a captain in the fog.
7.7 out of 10 companies do not trust the quality of their own data.
In addition, poor quality data costs companies on average about 30% of revenue.
To formulate a good battle plan, you need internal and external insights.
Cruijff needs data from his own players and from the opponents.
That way he knows where the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats lie.
The same applies to your company.
That’s why you want to take both an Outside-In and an Inside-Out approach:
The entire Business-Driven Marketing methodology (>100 pages + 14 templates) goes into ‘Intelligence’ within:
- Quantitative Data: all data that can be summed or measured in a numeric value, such as a number.
- Qualitative Data: all non-numerical data that often focuses on text, audio, images and/or video.
- Collect, Analyze & Visualize: all methods of unlocking reliable insights from data.
- Business Analytics: various forms of analytics to ensure your data is insightful and actionable.
- Business Intelligence: insight into your business, strengths and weaknesses.
- Market Intelligence: insight into your market, target market, opportunities and threats.
- Data Literacy: avoid making decisions based on faulty data and instead gain reliable, accurate and relevant insights.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
Goals
Ensure a clear direction.
Goals are like the ball for Cruijff: always in sight and defining every action on the field.
People perform better 90% of the time with relevant, challenging and achievable goals.
In addition, engaging colleagues in goal setting actually drives 3.6x higher engagement in goal achievement.
Multiple roads lead to Rome, but first you have to know you want to go to Rome and not Milan or Paris.
The complete Business-Driven Marketing methodology (> 100 pages + 14 templates) addresses within ‘Intelligence’:
- Mission & Vision: a clear dot on the horizon and path to it.
- Goal-Setting: a hierarchical structure in terms of goals to achieve company-wide aspirations.
- Budgeting: manage budget effectively and efficiently.
- Calculating: business cases to determine how high the bar should and can be set.
- Evaluate: ongoing reviews of goals and budgets to ensure effectiveness, efficiency and feasibility.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
Strategy
Ensure a proactive approach.
A goal without a plan remains a wish.
There are many roads that lead to Rome, but without navigation you run the risk of traveling through Africa unnecessarily.
Winning, say, the Champions League or becoming national champions inspires, but how do you achieve it?
You can hope for success without a strategy, just as you can hope to win in a lottery without buying a ticket.
If you do what you did, you get what you got.
Companies with a written-out strategy grow +30% faster.
The complete Business-Driven Marketing methodology (>100 pages + 14 templates) within ‘Strategy’ addresses:
- Growth Loops: discover your flywheel to systematic business growth.
- Strategies & Measures: establishing a reasoned strategy with associated KPIs.
- Actions, Deadlines & Responsibilities: determine actions with corresponding deadlines and assign responsibilities.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
Process
Ensure an iterative work process.
A strategy without execution is meaningless.
With a good process, results come naturally.
Growing 1% every day results in x37 growth after 365 days. That is the power of ‘Marginal Gains‘.
Conversely, shrinking 1% every day results in only 3% of the starting point after 365 days.
Just as Cruijff trained his team to get better every day, your business grows with an iterative process.
The complete Business-Driven Marketing methodology (>100 pages + 14 templates) goes into detail within ‘Process’:
- S.N.I.P.E. Cycles: the S.N.I.P.E. Process ensures that you make maximum impact in cycles of 2 to 4 weeks.
- Bottlenecks: using targeted research you will identify where the growth inhibitors of your Scale-Up lie and discover the underlying cause.
- Brainstorming: using proven tactics, you’re going to devise and concretize solutions to your growth inhibitors.
- Experimenting: make maximum impact in both the short and long term with scaling up successful or learning from failed experiments in a data-driven and reliable way.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
Experience
Ensure an excellent customer experience.
A satisfied customer is the best business strategy.
Companies that focus on customer experience see at least a +10% increase in sales.
However, 1 in 3 customers do not return after one bad experience.
Even 92% of your customers don’t return after 2-3 negative interactions.
A satisfied customer is like a supporter who continues to cheer on your team, through thick and thin.
The brand experience should be fluid, like Barcelona’s tiki-taka game under Cruijff.
How do you influence what people say about your company when you’re not there?
The complete Business-Driven Marketing methodology (>100 pages + 14 templates) addresses within ‘Experience’:
- Brand Values: 81% of consumers need to trust a brand before they consider buying something.
- Brand Story: a strong brand story is like an unforgettable match; it stays with you.
- Brand Promise: the best performing companies keep their promise 75% of the time.
- Brand Identity: a strong brand identity is like a good book; it tells a story that people don’t want to put down.
- Business Signature: make sure you become memorable and take charge of what people say when you’re not around.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
Stakeholders
Ensure the right people are involved at the right time.
Cruijff is judged on his results at FC Barcelona, but….
…transforming a poorly performing soccer club to national champion takes time.
If Cruijff’s results are disappointing, stakeholders must have been included in the process.
They must understand that sometimes it takes one step back to take two steps forward.
After all, Rome was not built in a day.
Companies that put marketing at the center of their growth strategy are twice as likely to grow more than +5% annually.
83% of global CEOs surveyed see marketing as the most important driver of growth.
Unfortunately, marketing is often limited to brand-related issues and lacks in-depth support from management.
To persistently convince your management of your vision and process, you must understand their thinking, share their feelings and speak their language.
Stakeholders are like the twelfth man on a soccer team; their support can make all the difference.
The complete Business-Driven Marketing methodology (>100 pages + 14 templates) within ‘Stakeholders’ addresses:
- Identifying Stakeholders: using proven criteria to determine stakeholder relevance.
- Managing Stakeholders: techniques to keep stakeholders properly engaged.
- Communication Plan: detailed elaboration of stakeholder communication templates to create and maintain support.
Wondering where you stand? Discover your current maturity with the free Marketing Maturity Scan.
How To Start with Business-Driven Marketing
On average, companies spend 9.5% of annual sales on marketing.
How do you make sure you use those resources as effectively and efficiently as possible?
By getting started with Business-Driven Marketing.
This is not a simple trick, but a complex process to structurally grow your Scale-Up.
Improve the 8 elements to transform your Scale-Up:
Start today in 5 steps with Business-Driven Marketing:
- Reach Product-Market Fit
Guarantee that you have a product or service that the market is waiting for (Product-Market Fit). Marketing will only show you faster that your business model does or does not work.
- Get Buy-In
Include all stakeholders in Business-Driven Marketing and get approval to start.
- Analyze Your Current Situation
Using the Business-Driven Marketing Maturity Model, map out your current situation.
- Define Your Desired Situation
Establish a concrete roadmap with actions, deadlines and responsibilities to increase your maturity.
- Execute Roadmap
Implement the roadmap and keep key stakeholders structurally up-to-date.
There are a total of 14 proven templates for using Business-Driven Marketing, including:
- Business-Driven Marketing Canvas
- Business-Driven Marketing Strategy Map
- Business-Driven Marketing Workbook
- Business-Driven Marketing Maturity Model
- Business-Driven Marketing Team Canvas
- Business-Driven Marketing Communication Plan
Wondering where you currently stand? Start immediately with the Marketing Maturity Scan:
Things are not always rosy.
“Persistence guarantees that results are inevitable.”
Just as Cruijff created his team around ‘Total Football’, you build your Scale-Up around Business-Driven Marketing.
Step by step, week by week, year by year – this is how you will win the ‘Champions League’ in your market.
Ready to grow?
Is your marketing not delivering the growth for your Scale-Up that it should?
Companies spend an average of 9.5% of annual sales on marketing.
Want to know your current maturity based on a reliable Marketing Management Methodology to:
- Grow your Scale-Up every day in the smartest way possible.
- Cost-effectively capture more market share.
- Acquire new customers more easily.
Then start the Marketing Maturity Scan right away.
Frequently Asked Questions on Business-Driven Marketing
Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) involves several stakeholders, including marketing teams, sales departments, product development, customer service, and management. Collaboration among these groups creates an integrated approach that helps grow Scale-Up.
Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) is especially suitable for Scale-Ups with a Product-Market Fit that want to grow quickly and increase their market share. It is ideal for companies that want to optimize their marketing efforts and respond effectively to changes in the market and customer behavior.
You start Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) when you notice that your current marketing efforts are not producing the desired growth, when there is a lack of marketing knowledge and clout, and when you want to systematically grow your business through a proven methodology.
Alternatives to Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) are traditional marketing strategies, such as product-oriented marketing, brand marketing, sales-oriented marketing. In addition, Growth Hacking / Growth Marketing can also be seen as alternatives. However, these methods often lack the systematic and integrated approach of BDM, which may make them less effective for high-growth Scale-Ups.
Examples of Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) can be found in companies that take a systematic approach to marketing, using data-driven decisions, setting clear goals, and implementing iterative processes. These companies often demonstrate a high degree of adaptability and customer focus.
You measure the effectiveness of Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) by tracking specific KPIs, such as growth in market share, customer satisfaction, lead generation, and revenue growth. In addition, evaluations of internal processes and achievement of strategic goals are essential to assess the impact of BDM.
Advantages of Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) include an integrated approach, data-driven decisions, and a focus on continuous improvement. Disadvantages may include the complexity of implementation and the need for extensive training and change in corporate culture.
The components of Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) include Organization, Skills, Intelligence, Goals, Strategy, Process, Experience and Stakeholders. Each component plays a critical role in the success of the marketing strategy and overall Scale-Up growth.
Yes, Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) is science-based and based on extensive research and analysis of successful marketing strategies. It combines industry best practices with academic insights to provide a robust and effective methodology.
Common mistakes in Business-Driven Marketing (BDM) include failing to involve all relevant stakeholders, ignoring data-driven insights, lacking clear objectives, and failing to implement iterative processes. It is also crucial to have the right skills and resources available for successful implementation.
The post Business-Driven Marketing (BDM): 8 Steps to Drive Business Impact [+14 Templates] appeared first on Gust de Backer.
