OK, you’ve completed all but 2 of your 15 B2B marketing steps to success. You’ve started executing your B2B marketing project or plan, so you’re pretty much there, right?

Wrong!

You need to test early and test often. Review the activities as you execute them and where possible measure as soon as you can. When a reasonable time has elapsed for each activity to flow through your business, measure the return on the activity and enter the actual results in the last few columns of your activity plan, so that you can see how you stack up against your target results. Then, over time, you can fine-tune your future targets with the benefit of hindsight and increasing experience.

Beware – not many companies close the loop. They do a plan for a project or period, execute, maybe measure the results, but they don’t then learn from the misses and incorporate the learnings into the next plan. Make sure you’re not one of the companies that misses, repeatedly.

Review, measure, learn, adjust and execute again. Until you’re done executing.