Modern marketing teams need to operate at a high level of efficiency and effectiveness if they are to meet market challenges and provide value to their organisations. 

High performing marketing teams are knowledgeable and are deeply integrated into the organisation, working closely with all departments to deliver against business goals.

But how do you instill a high performing mindset within a marketing team? What steps should a marketing team leader take to improve critical thinking and performance?

This post details five ways for marketing team leaders to begin or advance the process of moving towards truly high performance.

The most important psychological aspect a marketing team leader can bring to a marketing team is curiosity. High performing teams are eager to learn, develop, and grow. The highest-performing marketers never stop learning and constantly push themselves to learn new skills and try out interesting tools. 

Offer your team opportunities to learn and adapt. You might encourage them to take on special projects outside their scope of work (Google ringfence 10% of all employees time for innovation projects), learning or charitable endeavours. 

By empowering your team and let them co-curate areas of development, you’ll start to create a curious, growth minded marketing team that becomes future proof.

In most organisations, marketing teams have an arms length relationship with customers as the responsibility for winning the sale and then growing it sits with sales. But high performing marketing teams continually interact with customers, ensuring they are listened to and continue to be supported. 

Having an important touchpoint is crucial in energising team members and emboldening them with a sense of purpose. The closer each marketing member is to your customers, the higher your team will perform. This is because you’ll be more attuned to their needs, what is working and what isn’t. 

Almost every organisation has some kind of commercial objective – even charities and third sector have fundraising goals. The more aligned your marketing team is to the achievement of commercial objectives, the better the marketing outputs and outcomes. 

Set metrics that you assess daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly that help move the needle when it comes to your organisation’s commercials. 

This commitment to performance will also help you when you want to increase the size of the team or ask for more budget for specific projects and initiatives.

Give your marketing team the best chance of success by investing in the right marketing technology and the training to make the most of it. For teams that want to operate at a continuously higher level, access to usable data and efficiency in application is critical.

High performing marketing teams have a mindset of seeking to improve, which often leads to more revenue and more growth. Having the right data facilitates better collaboration, more informed planning, and transparency – all essential for successful marketing campaigns. 

Marketing leaders that focus on improving processes and workflow can yield tremendous results.

Accountability is critical in moving towards goals of any kind and high performing CMOs ensure each team member is responsible for 1-3 marketing team KPIs. 

By setting objectives and the methods you’ll use to track and measure them, you can optimise campaigns, make adjustments, manage resources and reassign tasks. 

Using project management tools such as Slack, Asana and Airtable and creating dashboards where your team can see the results of their work is essential to a higher level of performance. 

It will help everyone commit to team and individual deliverables.

Creating and managing a high performing team requires short and long term thinking. 

To stay ahead of the competition, you have to do more than just conceive creative campaigns. The best, most relevant work comes from being the most skilled and most organised. 

Remember the saying “hard work beats talent”.

Check out the new MMC Learning Team Training Hub where you can access expert blog posts.

Learn how MMC Learning helps marketing teams like yours and upskill your marketing team here.

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