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Why Don't We Have Time for Training?

June 9, 2011

If you read the blogs and articles on the internet about training the reasons most often cited for training people are that it makes employees feel good about themselves and the company they work for.  Trained people need less supervision, and are more capable of handling a variety of tasks.  All good, and you'll get to that when things slow down a bit - RIGHT!.

There is a more compelling reason to train - especially marketing training.  And that is to inject process into your system.  Marketing has held process at arm's length feeling that adopting it would stem the creativity necessary for great marketing programs.   Phooey.   Process is probably the most important and valuable tool marketing could every embrace.  And training people to understand and use process will make people feel more empowered and important (because they will get more done, faster), but more importantly it will make your organization incredibly more effective and efficient.

The most important aspect of process is that is sets standards and provides benchmarks, all necessary if people are going to improve their performance.  Today in many companies the marketing team has come from a number of other companies, or disciplines.  They are smart people but each has been taught to do the same job differently.  As a result you end up with a varied level of job performance and a lot of stop and start as people figure out "how the job is done here". 

Teach (or train if you like) every one of your team to do the same job the same way, using the same standard as your guide and you will be able to take a huge amount of costs (less rework, fewer missed deadlines and mistakes) out of your system.

So teach your team new skills to make them feel good about themselves.  But help them do their job consistently better and watch the savings mount - Mark Addicks, CMO General Mills found that he reduced his non-working budget by $2 million by simply adopting and teaching standard practices for marketing activities. 

What could you do with another $2 million to invest in real consumption driving marketing programs?


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