Assess Your Marketing Skills with These Worksheets
If you want to bump up your marketing skills to enhance your company’s bottom line, it’s a good idea to sit down and assess the skills you possess and the ones that need some work. Using worksheets can give you a better understanding of the skills you need to be effective in marketing, so you can make the right choices to help your business grow.
First, you'll need to think about the things you need to do in order to be successful in marketing. Every business has different marketing needs, but there are skills that any successful marketer needs to have. For example, you need to be a good communicator, be organized, and have the ability to work well with others. You have to have a deep understanding of your products or services. It helps if you truly like and use the product or service you are selling and are able to share that passion with your clients and customers.
You need to know how to assess your clients and their needs and determine which of your products meets those needs. And you should be able to read people’s reactions to your product. Your aim is to build long-lasting relationships with your clients.
Our sample worksheet shows some traits of a successful marketer and an assessment of skills. The assessment lists both positive and negative traits. The more detailed the responses, the easier it is to understand what needs to be improved.
Print our blank worksheet to assess your own marketing skills. To get started, try to come up with as many skills as you can that are relevant to your marketing niche, and then accurately assess your skills. If you market face-to-face, are you always professional, organized, and on time?
If you market online, do you answer e-mail as quickly as possible, process orders efficiently, and stay on top of your advertising and marketing campaigns? Do you have good relationships with your customers and know the details of your products? Do you love what you do? Do you truly think you’re the best marketer you can be, or do you want to attain more? You can address all these questions as you fill out the worksheet.
Don't be afraid to admit where your skills are lacking. When you discover your weaknesses, you can take steps to fix them, such as asking a friend to help get you up to speed on social networking, or reading a book on how to make a sales pitch. If communication is your weak point, maybe you can take a class in public speaking.
The key to using this worksheet is to be brutally honest with yourself. Maybe you’ll discover you don’t really have the personality for in-person marketing and you feel more comfortable developing marketing strategies and writing copy. That’s fine, because you can hone your skills from there and really develop into the marketing professional your business needs. Just remember to honestly assess your skills and weaknesses, and then act on those assessments to be an even better marketer.
