Doing More with Less, the Crux of Marketing and Limited Resources

When I was in business school, one of the questions I was always asked during interviews was: What did you do in this situation with limited resources.  And I always wondered about that question, limited resources?  Don't marketing groups have these large budgets to go do what they need to do?  Don't they have service groups and external companies to help them with what they need to do?  But after six years in corporate B2B marketing, I clearly understand what they mean.

One example of limited resources is limited time and bandwidth as an individual.  Even when you have teams that are supporting you.  Whether it's email marketing, design services, editors, videographers and advertising firms, even with an imaginary unlimited budget, the key bottleneck will be the product marketing person.  In the end, someone has to have the vision, the responsibility of executing on a specific initiative or program. And there's only so much you can outsource out. Eventually the responsibility ends with you as a professional marketing person which means meetings to report on milestones, direction and then a post-mortem to understand what was accomplished, what could have been done better and how to improve things next time.

And let's just say you are burning the midnight oil, creating assets, copy and programs that are innovative and interesting for your prospects.  In the end, one person can only do so much so you end up driving the work through your service groups.  The reality is that once you get past yourself as a bottleneck, there may be another one downstream.  Maybe your editors are backed up with all sorts of work and special projects.  Maybe people are on vacation a lot.  In the end, you are only as good as your downstream resource groups.  If they are unable to keep up with your output, there's going to be trouble.

The final part of this limited resources question is the input. As the product marketing person you quickly learn that everyone thinks they can do your job.  Engineers, Brand, Product Management, everyone.  And everyone, of course, has advice and suggestions on something cool and new to do which will absolutely work. Or they will absolutely need to have.  New ideas are really dime-a-dozen.  What matters in marketing is what you can execute on and get over the line.  When I say get over the line, it doesn't mean an automatic success.  But it means completing the task or program to the point where either you have a success, a failure or something in between to learn from in concrete ways.  There are a million ideas out there, don't get overwhelmed trying to deliver them all.

In the end, one of the key skills any product marketing person will have is balancing expectations, reporting and results to all involved to effectively meet goals for your product lines.  And that line moves over time and is often fuzzy. Without the innate instincts of where to put your efforts and what's most important to execute on from a financial, business and political standpoint, you'll sink your time and energy into endeavours that will not benefit your team, your product line or yourself.

So what would you do with limited resources?  Unfortunately that's an answer any professional marketing person must answer every day, every hour that they are working.  Yes, I totally understand that question now!