The Essential Skill Set for Modern B2B Marketers

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Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

Just like everyone else, B2B marketers wear different hats in the duties they perform. In order to become successful, they need a mix of marketing skills. These skills vary in range depending on the task needed at hand.

What is the essential skill set for modern B2B marketers? Here is a basic outline of the skills required:

1.  Communication –Communicating with prospects, current customers, co-workers and management all require excellent communication skills. In B2B marketing, it’s imperative to communicate the features and benefits of your products to prospects in different mediums. The modern marketer should become familiar with most, if not all of them including: 

  • Writing – Including everything from email marketing writing to sales copy to blogging, marketers spend a good amount of time writing and should excel at it.
  • Speaking – Some marketers must also use their voice on items such as phone calls, conferences, videos and even B2B podcasts.
  • Networking – As B2B social media grows, the marketer must communicate with prospects and customers through networking. This is not only for online, but also offline networking events such as conferences and seminars.

2.  Analytics – Great B2B marketing includes accountable metrics on campaigns and other operations. How will you convince the CEO to give marketing more funding? Not only do marketers need to create reports, they have to understand the data in the reports.

With the right marketing automation solution, the marketer will have no problem organizing data, creating reports and sharing that information to those that’s it’s relevant to.

3.  Forecasting – Creating an informative B2B marketing forecast is key to every marketing team. With a solid forecast, marketing is able to look ahead and predict valuable information for the business. Adding things like the number of leads generated in a given time or how leads will move through lead nurturing, you also predict sales, revenue and growth of the company.

4.  Sales – Since marketing is responsible for things like demand generation and networking interactions, marketing needs to also comprehend sales to move prospects down the lead nurturing ladder. With the understanding of the right sales techniques, not only sales, but marketing also contributes to the overall revenue cycle.

There are other skills needed by today’s modern marketer, but the skill set listed above is used daily. To be successful, the B2B marketer must rely on all of their knowledge and constantly be evolving their skillset.

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Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2010/10/modern-marketing-skills.html