I spend a lot of time telling companies how to turbo-charge their marketing and sales performance. But sometimes, it is first necessary to talk about what not to do. We do this by taking a sober assessment of B2B marketing campaigns, strategies, lead generation programs, expenses, etc., and immediately stop:

• Anything that does not have the full support of senior management.
• Lead generation programs that are not followed up by the sales team.
• Campaigns that do not reinforce your core message.
• Expenses that do not contribute to the overall objective.
• Unnecessary and/or time wasting reporting and analysis.
• Working with people who are unreliable and/or unproductive.
• Anything that you are doing as a manager that is impeding your staff’s ability to get their jobs done quickly and efficiently.

The list of potential things to stop can be much larger (how about unnecessary meetings?). Remember that everything you spend time on has an opportunity cost – something more productive you could be doing. In this sense, you are competing against yourself: your smart and efficient inner marketer is competing against the knucklehead and sloppy marketer. You just have to let the good guy win and tell the knucklehead to go away.

Likewise, everything you spend money on has to be evaluated against all the other ways you could spend the same amount of money. If you determine that the expense is not worth it but you don’t really have anything else worthwhile to spend the money on, you can try something really unusual—give the money back to the company. Your CFO will love you and you will feel like a first-class corporate citizen.