Everyone wants a marketing team that consistently delivers results. But, what is that formula? Here’s the mindset that drives our team at Kaleidico.

Develop and defend a great culture – We’re talking about creating higher performing teams this week. But, the first question is – Do you even have a team? I define a team as people working together, pulling for the same mission, and passionate about achieving a shared vision. Culture is the thing that makes that happen and then happen over and over again in a consistent way.

Anthony Tjan gives an excellent synopsis of how to develop and sustain great culture.

“Sell shit” – I stole this from Gary Vaynerchuk, but he nails it. Nothing to improve on that statement.

So many marketing departments divorce themselves from their sales teams. I actually had a client (a marketing director), once upon a time, tell me that he didn’t want to generate any leads, he wanted lots of web traffic, but no leads. Of course, I asked, “why?”

Wait for it…He didn’t want to hear the sales team complain about the quality of the leads.

I’ll start with the punchline first: That company is out of business!

Now, to quickly analyze what is wrong with that statement: 1.) Your only job, as a marketing team, is to fuel the business with new opportunities, period. 2.) If you’re not selling anything to your web visitors, as a business, you serve no purpose. You deliver no value. People don’t come to corporate websites for fun–they go to Buzzfeed and Bleacher Report for that. Sure, they want your website to be cool, but they come to buy shit.

Get your marketing team laser focused on selling.

(You might have noticed, no article to reference here. Marketing pundits seem to be terrified to talk about selling. I’ll have to write one in the next couple of weeks.)

Do things that don’t scale – From the best I can tell, the origin of this great advice is Paul Graham. However, it was this recent article from Groove and it’s great tactical examples that got me thinking about this powerful marketing advice again.

Here’s the crux of the matter on this one. If you’re going to be truly effective with your marketing strategies and tactics you have to think big but work small. The biggest successes are going to come from you going deep, digging into the details and figuring out how your available marketing channels work and how the people in them behave. That means your first test of any new marketing idea needs you on the frontlines understanding the pending battle in front of you.

Study people – This is hands down the most consistently missing piece in every marketing department I encounter–a genuine curiosity about people. If you want build a track record for consistently creating campaigns that work and move people to the cash register, you need learn how people behave.

Since we’re talking about digital marketing here, it’s especially important to be curious about how people behave in groups and communities. You need to become a student of sociology. It’s different, and that can make all the difference in your outcomes.

So, that’s the general formula that drives us here as a team at Kaleidico each and every day. How do you create high-performance marketing teams – or any team for that matter – where you work?