Deadly Sin 1: Lack of Self-Awareness. Acknowledge where your competitors are better at certain things than you are, and vice versa. If you do this in a spirit of openness and truth seeking, I guarantee it will be time well-spent.

Deadly Sin 2: Perfectionism. The need to be perfect can be counterproductive and the struggle for perfection can freeze you into inaction. Consistency and quantity of output are important characteristics of productive marketing, and a needless search for perfection can be a detriment to your success.

Deadly Sin 3: Living in the Past. Past success can lead to future failure. Some of what worked for you just two to three years ago may now be obsolete, let alone what you did ten or twenty years ago. One of the best ways to prevent living in the past is to watch how companies are marketing and selling to you and emulate the best practices.

Deadly Sin 4: Failure to Quantify. As a B2B marketer, data is your friend, not something to be shunned. In tough economic times, with competition from every corner of the globe as well as cyberspace, most organizations can’t afford to measure results in soft terms-rather, they need hard data that tells them how many people are seeing each promotion, how many are responding, and how prospects are being moved through each stage of the end-to-end process until they become customers.

Deadly Sin 5: Failure to Test. Whether you call it resting on your laurels or staying with the status quo, inertia is your enemy. Programs that work today will tend to deteriorate if you fail to refine them, and the best way to know what needs refinement is to test. Every element of marketing campaigns can be tested, including the target audience, offers, benefits, messaging, media, copy and graphics.

Deadly Sin 6: Inaction. Sometimes you won’t have all the facts, sometimes you won’t know how a target audience will respond, sometimes you won’t have the luxury of waiting for all the research to come in, neatly tied up in a bow, with no doubt as to the outcome. However, this lack of certainty should not freeze you into inaction. If you are in a fast-paced market, it is sometimes necessary to forget ready-aim-fire and instead practice ready-fire-aim. You learn by doing, not just by studying, pondering, and analyzing.

Deadly Sin 7: Focusing on What Doesn’t Matter. As a marketing or sales manager, you and your staff have a limited amount of time and no doubt, a large number of tasks before you. Every minute you spend on a nonproductive activity hurts you in two ways, first because you wasted time on something that is not helpful, and second because that activity prevented you from spending time on something that is helpful. If you concentrate your time on what is really important to effective marketing and sales, and drop the rest, you will not only benefit the company immensely, but you may even find a little extra time for the truly important things, like family and friends. Wouldn’t that be great?

Note: This post was excerpted from an article in Colorado Biz Magazine.  The entire article can be found at:  http://www.cobizmag.com/articles/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-marketing-and-sales