So here’s the last post in my series on B2B marketing banana skins to avoid, learned the hard way from my career so far. There are many more than 10 of course. These are the ones that came to my mind when I conceived the series. I may return to it another time, but, for now, I think 10 things to worry about not doing is more than enough.

B2B marketing banana skin no 10 to avoid is this: thinking your product or service will get there. It won’t. Ever.

There aren’t enough resources to develop a product or service into something that you and your customers think is complete. If there were it would be unaffordable and unsellable – if that’s even a word. It’s never complete. In fact it will probably never be close to complete. That’s the nature of things; there are too many competing and conflicting demands.

That’s why the golden rule of B2B marketing and sales is this – SWYG. Pronounced ‘swig’ and standing for Sell What You Got. For us marketers, it’s OK to allow for a marketing lag and promote something we don’t have yet, as long as the typical demand and sales cycle is not much longer than the time you have reasonably allowed for the new product/feature/service to be available for sale.

The word ‘reasonable’ is of course etched with uncertainty, so be careful with the claims you make, or you’ll end up with that most hated of products, the phantom.

We’re almost at the end of my series on B2B marketing banana skins that I failed to avoid and that you can sidestep – if you haven’t already. One more after this and it might be time to park the series for an unspecified period :-).

My B2B marketing banana skin no 9 to avoid is this: don’t think that you have the perfect marketing team. You don’t.

How could you have? You may have what you feel is a pretty stellar assemblage of team members, each complementing each other brilliantly. But that, in my opinion, sets you on the road to complacency – yours and theirs. A truly excellent marketing team is often a fleetingly short notion. After all, these people are good, right? That means they’re often approached by other peers or companies. It also means they command a certain standard of projects that challenge them and develop them.

If they’re really good then they might be ready for a tilt at your job, or a similar job at another firm.

Always keep you ear close to your network. Always be keeping an eye on really great people to add to your team. Before you know it, you might be back-filling an empty role rather than looking to budget for an additional head.

When someone good from your team pulls you aside for a chat and says they’ve been offered a great new job, let them go. Encourage them to go. They’ve probably checked out emotionally and if they’re trying to use you for leverage with a new job or get you to improve their package and stay with you – well, they’re not as great as you thought.

You might think they’re irreplaceable, but they always are, and often with better yet people. No, never think you have the perfect team.

In 25-plus years of B2B marketing, I’ve left a few banana skins on the floor, and failed to pick them up before slipping on them myself. This is why I’m sharing a short series of banana skins so that you might see them before it’s too late – unless you already know them, in which case, you’re ahead of me.

B2B marketing banana skin no 8 to avoid is this: thinking the big deal is in before the big deal is really in. There’s no better feeling in the B2B marketing world than knowing your marketing efforts made a difference, that they hooked in a major or strategic customer. It’s almost always time for some serious mental cartwheels.

That big deal, however, is never truly ‘in’, until you’ve received the contractual paperwork. Verbal commitments mean very little. And then it still might not happen, or the implementation might be problematic, or the customer may negotiate away the marketing clauses at a higher or unseen level to you. And even then the deal may not be a crowning success, preventing you from leveraging further marketing and advocacy benefits.

The best way to deal with this is to hope for the best, plan for the worst. If you have 2 or 3 of these large deals on the hook, you’ve safety in numbers, you’ve some insurance. Always ask yourself what you would need to do to double the pipeline number, to smash it to smithereens, to bring in twice the number of marquee customers. Then that ‘sure fire’ deal becomes far less of an issue, but no less of an opportunity if it goes swimmingly.

I’m amassing a relatively short list of B2B marketing banana skins to avoid, based largely on my history of occasionally planting my heel on the floor with gay abandon, hitting the yellow stuff and ending up chest skywards. Hopefully you don’t do the same, or at least less often.

B2B marketing banana skin no 7 to skip round is this: thinking you can police your brand. You can’t; it’s not possible.

OK, so you can to a degree in the B2B world, and you should certainly put guidelines in place and make it as easy as possible for your stakeholders to toe the line and not dilute your asset.

However, all the new, good, short domain names have been gone for 15 years, so there is the distinct probability that customers will mis-pronounce your name – company or products – mis-spell your name, or mis-use your name, that’s if they don’t forget it.

Thanks to the wonders of office productivity tools, your staff and partners will adapt your brand identity for documents, signage, collateral, interfaces and so on. They’ll use the wrong colours, the wrong typeface, the wrong pointsize, the wrong spacing, and generally place it in a bunch of contexts for which it wasn’t designed or intended. They’ll not know the messaging, or adapt it to their own purposes, or not use it properly.

What can you do about this? What you’re already probably doing, which is to issue guidelines, reminders and encouragement to protect the company’s investment since consistency, culture and value is what it’s all about.

Do your best to police your brand, but don’t be a fascist about it and don’t let it disrupt your sleep. There are other, bigger fish to fry (unless you’re vegetarian).

When you’ve spent over two decades in B2B marketing, you’re bound to slip on a few banana skins along the way. You tend to be the better from it in the long run too, which is why I’m sharing a series of them with you, curated by me from a list of memorable and not-so-memorable faux pas along the way.

B2B marketing banana skin no 6 is this: don’t assume that your marketing budget is fixed. It is not. It is a fluid, movable feast subject to the fortunes of your company and likely be adjusted up or down – sometimes a few times during a financial year.

I’m generally for front-loading expenditure in a budget period. The earlier you can make the investment, the earlier you can see the rewards. Then, if you’ve very little or nothing left in Q4, hopefully you can ride the wave of the good work that’s gone before and see the returns come in before the next financial year. On the other hand, if things don’t go well in H1 you might find that rug of a big event earmarked for Q4 gets pulled from under your feet.

If you’re ahead of plan, there’s every chance you can bid for and be allocated additional funds. Also, if you can demonstrate why a market is proving harder to crack than you anticipated, the executive might go to the well some more for you.

Let’s face it, we all hope that our budgets get revised upward during the year. It’s wise to bear in mind that there’s always a chance they might get revised down too.

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.