Marketing Accountability: Proving Field Marketing is Worthwhile Investment

For companies as a whole, not just in their field marketing department, the single aim is to make as much revenue as possible whilst costing as little as possible to do it, the highest executives will be keeping a constant eye on efficiency, ready to trim off any extra fat. In harder economic times like today businesses have been forced onto economy drives and had to make sweeping cuts to department budgets, every single aspect of businesses have had to justify their expenses and account for the profit they contribute to the business. Accountability is even more important to dedicated field marketing firms. Companies like cosine field marketing operate by convincing companies that field marketing will increase their profits, they can show clients the profits from sales they have achieved and use it to convince clients that their expenses will justify the generated revenue. Field marketing benefits like few other areas of business as it can demonstrate an immediate return on investment, following the direct nature of field marketing, figures of revenue from units they have sold directly indicate the return. Because many departments are absolutely essential to businesses and can therefore feel safe from budget cuts, field marketing is often mistakenly seen as extra extravagance. Products will go out to be sold anyway, field marketing can be seen as a business 'want' rather than a 'need,' and therefore potentially expendable. This is where field marketing professionals face the unique challenge of proving their worth. What they must do is calculate the general revenue of a company without field marketing, then use the value of the extra sales gained thanks directly to field marketing initiatives and use that to demonstrate their value. At face value this is fairly simple, the revenue of extra sales minus the cost of hiring field marketing proves the profit of the practice, the difficulty however lies in defining the sales with and without. Field marketing also has an impact on customer relations, a well marketed product and campaign that appeals to the public will make them more amiable towards the company in the future, increasing long term profits. So field marketing might appear complicated and possible to live without, but as the ultimate goal of business is profit and field marketing can directly prove their profits and customer benefits, the practice is in fact essential to any successful company.