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Intermediate/ Excerpt...

But unlike with sales, there is no concerted organizational effort to train marketing. Marketers attend the general employee new hire orientation and – if they are lucky – can access an intranet portal that contains a haphazard and frequently out-of-date set of materials for the department. Maybe they even get a list of company acronyms as a bonus!

This is a growing disconnect that gets scarier when you look at some SiriusDecisions research data:

• Eighty-five percent of people currently in b-to-b marketing positions were not professionally trained in marketing prior to stepping into their roles.
• Seventy-five percent of marketers learned on-the-job through trial and error. Only 20 percent have taken advantage of opportunistic or ad hoc training, and a mere 5 percent have been systematically trained as part of a professional development program.
• Eighty-one percent of b-to-b organizations spend $1,000 or less annually on marketing training and development. Only 3 percent spend more than $2,000 annually.

Time for a change?

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Advanced/ Digest...

Three Ways to Build an Internal Training Program

1) Review Current Onboarding Program
Consider what your organization requires of new employees. Cut the fat on unnecessary, outdated training for new employees, and infuse any new technologies, processes and systems used by your staff.
Create a list of the fundamental requirements for all employees, and put new hires on a 6-month completion deadline.

2) Take Advantage of Existing Programs and Resources
Why recreate the wheel? If your team is lagging in fundamental areas such as data analysis, SEO or general digital best practices (or inbound), use training programs developed by leaders in those spaces.

3) Implement Professional Development Requirements at All Stages
Whether at the beginning of their career or a senior pro, marketers must continually educate themselves to stay at the top of their game. Otherwise, they will fail to reach target audiences, produce results, reach goals and “win” in their market.  With no abatement in sight, marketers have the choice to either evolve or become obsolete—the choice is yours.

To keep your marketing team at the forefront of innovation, enact a professional development plan for employees at every stage of their career. Tie these items to goals of efficiency, expertise and needed areas of improvement.

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Fortune 500 companies and global agencies face a serious digital marketing skills shortage, according to the State of Digital Marketing Talent report.

Excerpts...

Overall, the study found that executives are unhappy with the skills of digital and social media team talent, and there is a large talent gap hurting sales, employee retention, and marketing ROI.

There is a large talent gap—a substantial difference between the digital marketing skills team members should possess, and the skills they currently have.

71% of large companies believe their digital team is strong in some specialities, but weak in others, with sizable gaps in every area studied. Only 8% of those surveyed believe their employees are strong in all areas of digital marketing.

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A survey of about 400 B2B salespeople and marketers around the world, conducted by Corporate Visions, has found that salespeople are not being armed with the right tools to deliver new product messages. In turn, almost 60% of respondents believe that only a minority of salespeople are delivering new product messages the way they were intended. Among the issues uncovered: only 38% of companies offer formal training to sales reps for new product launches at least three-quarters of the time, and only 22% said sales reps are required to demonstrate proficiency in message delivery.