B2B Marketing Playbook – Chapter 1: Taking Inventory

To ensure the success of your marketing efforts as a one-person (or small-staff) B2B marketing shop, you must start by mapping out your shop’s current knowledge or skills in three categories: those which you can competently bring to the table yourself, those which you believe you can learn to provide, and those which you are willing to outsource.

Knowledge and Skills Inventory

While there are many ways you can map out the knowledge and skills you bring to the job, the key is to document this process in such a way that it helps you to (a) visualize this inventory (it sinks in better) and (b) use that map to concretely make decisions in the future regarding the best augmentation of these skills (e.g., criteria for hiring new positions, outsourcing specific services, or bringing in incremental talent).

Below is one particular exercise to help you with this process. Forms 1 through 5 present lists of tasks that are critical to the major marketing competency areas. You can use these lists to rate your shop’s

  • knowledge level (0 – 10, where 0 is “we have no knowledge” and 10 is “we have the full knowledge we need”), and
  • skill level (0 – 10, where 0 is “we can’t do this at all” and 10 is “we can confidently do this with high quality”).

Below is a quick overview of each of the B2B marketing playbook inventory forms. Click here to download and print your own copy so you can score yourself.

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Scoring Your Inventory

For each form, total the Knowledge and Skills column and divide by the number of items in the list to determine your average score in that task group. The average score as well as individual line item scores will give you a concrete idea of where you can provide leadership or execution energy and where you require more assistance.

Next Step

In our next post in the B2B Marketing Playbook, we will examine “Filling the Gaps.” This will present various strategies to take advantage of your strengths while examining incremental services and next key hires (as your budget grows) to ensure you deliver on your marketing mission.

Want to talk about how we can assist you in marketing? Contact Growthpoint here.