Skills, knowledge and behaviours marketing teams need to anticipate and respond to customer needs
In today’s blog we wanted to build on our blog post from the 26 March [link] where we discussed the enablers to anticipate and respond to customer needs identified during Natasha Milsted’s, MBA research project. Today, we wanted to talk in depth more about the employee capabilities needed within marketing teams.
By employee capabilities we mean the skills, knowledge and behaviours that individuals within marketing teams need. This has been split into three sections: marketing leader behaviours and team behaviours and skills. These form the people element of the people, process and technology framework we used to explore this topic.
Marketing leader behaviours
“It’s about engagement, negotiation, taking the business on the journey, because it’s culture change a little bit.”
We spoke in-depth to ten senior and mid-level leaders within marketing to understand what would enable marketing teams to anticipate and respond to customer needs. These leaders spoke at length about needing to be able to facilitate conversations, influence internal stakeholders and have difficult conversations. This is about creating the pathways and collaborative environment their team and wider business needed to successfully create the processes needed.
Team behaviours
“the skill set and behaviours that I think are really important are flexibility, open-mindedness, a curiosity”
Respondents discussed how their teams needed to be more confident, and this meant a variety of things. More confident in making decisions, at challenging internal stakeholder perceptions and being able to have difficult conversations. They also discussed marketing team members needing to have a curiosity mindset meaning being open, asking questions, willingness to learn, and collaborating with others.
This curiosity and openness extended to the tension between marketing and other functions such as sales or customer experience or care teams. There was a need identified for marketing team members to show more of an interest in other functions and build stronger relationships with their peers.
Team skills
“we had a ton of data, no one really interpreting it in any helpful way.”
Analytical and interpretation skills were frequently mentioned in interviews. There was a need for junior marketing team members to have a commercial awareness and understand the context their business was operating within. Being able to link their work and customer-centric initiatives back to business growth levers within their organisation.
However, it also meant being able to take a step back and think about the wider perspective of the data they were analysing and being able to join up the dots. For example, rather than focusing on one metric or channel being able to look at the data for the whole customer journey and understand how it fits together and where the bigger opportunities are.
To conclude, anticipating and responding to customer needs was driven by people, process and technology. In this blog post we explored the capabilities needed by people within marketing teams. This research highlights the critical role of marketing leaders in creating collaborative, influential environments, alongside teams that are confident, curious and open to challenge. By blending these behaviours with robust analytical, commercial, and interpretative abilities, marketing becomes more capable of linking customer insights to impactful business actions. Ultimately, investing in the right mix of skills, knowledge and behaviours enables marketing teams to move beyond reacting to customers, and instead proactively shape experiences that drive long-term value.
