I’m putting together a series of blog posts covering what I consider to be the main B2B marketing banana skins best avoided, largely culled from my own experience and which I failed to avoid myself.

B2B marketing banana skin no 5 to avoid slipping on is this: failing to follow the purchasing process properly.

I know, it sounds obvious, but if you’re new to a role, you’re keen to get some projects rolling and stamp your authority on things, it might even be your own budget, and your own P&L…you still need to follow the purchasing process.

I’ve fallen foul of this by assuming wrongly that I could spend my budget as I saw fit. Sometimes you need to get 3 or more quotes, sometimes you need to raise a purchase order, sometimes the finance director needs to sanction all expenditure even though it’s coming from your pot. If you commission work without going through the proper channels, your FD will be slow to pay the invoice and your suppliers will not be best pleased. Worse still, they may not release the funds at all, and then your ability to commit to work and sign contracts will be called into question.

Sometimes you get lucky and your best suppliers are smart enough to ask you exactly how your purchase process works. Then you can find out from the right people and follow it.

Better still, check first before you commit to anything :-).

I’m sharing a series of banana skins to avoid in the world of B2B marketing, in the hope that you won’t slip on them as I did, and many before me.

B2B marketing banana skin no 3 to avoid is this: don’t think you’ll perfectly crack data quality. Data quality is always flawed, because of the human element. Once you rely on people to enter data or amass information, you’re prey to fallibility and competing priorities.

When it comes to buying data for marketing purposes, or getting your sales people to correctly enter data into the system, or interrogating the data you have to get something useful out of it for decision-making, you’re onto a loser from the word go. Even if you’re using automation to amass and update your data, at some point in the chain of events you’ll have effectively paid people not a huge amount of money to get through the quantity and not focus on the quality. Too much focus on quality over a smaller amount of data makes it unprofitable for them and unaffordable for you.

Instead, realise that a certain percentage of data accuracy is all you can ever aim for, and try to put in place processes and incentives so that those who benefit from good data can see what’s in it for them if they make reasonable efforts.

As I mentioned in my previous post – although these posts are not sequential so you don’t need to read a previous post for homework like some of my other blogging series – I’m putting together a series of B2B marketing banana skins to avoid which will hopefully help you short-cut progress in your career and get to where you want to be quicker than I did.

My B2B marketing banana skin no 2 to avoid is this: don’t think you’ll get all the information you need from your CRM system. This may sound slightly controversial, since there is a wealth of excellent CRM – customer relationship management – systems out there that you can customise for your own specific purposes.

You’ll get a lot of the information you need, but not all. This is because it’s incredibly hard to design a brief for how you want your CRM system to behave before you start using it, especially if your business is in a relatively fast-moving industry. Once you start using it, you’ll realise things that you hadn’t thought of and you’ll want to make changes, which is hard to do once it’s been implemented. It’s one of the unspoken catch-22 rules of CRM systems. You’re always playing catch-up. The reports you create and the forecasting you do are rarely exactly what you’re looking for.

We live in a world of precious resources and if your business spends an unreasonably indulgent amount of time trying to perfect your CRM, you’ll become uncompetitive.

Focus on the few key aspects of your system that will govern the largest part of your success. The other aspects are nice-to-haves, which is to say they’re won’t-ever-haves.

I’ve been working in business to business – aka B2B – marketing for a long time. This means I’ve made a lot of mistakes and slipped on a lot of banana skins, an awful lot of them. Far too many to devote a post to every single one of them, I’m afraid. I thought it worthwhile, however, to share a few of them over the next few weeks.

So here’s my B2B marketing banana skin no 1 to avoid. It’s this: thinking the research is going to give you answers.

You have to do the research into your market of course. You can’t base many decisions without information. My point here is the research you do for your business is never enough, and it’s never exactly the right information.

I’ve worked in several businesses and in each case we’ve sought to get certain information to help us form our strategy. You simply can’t get the information you need, sliced in the way you want it. Even the information experts, the ones who do nothing else for a living, can’t give you exactly what you need. If you could get it, you’ve probably missed the market.

Avoid the B2B marketing banana skin of thinking you’ll get a perfect market picture. You’ll get some of it, and you’ll have to make assumptions and do qualified guesswork on the rest. Study the information you have and make your best play. Don’t wait for something perfect to come along. It won’t. Pick a point and go.